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Physical Review Letters

Strongly Driven Semiconductor Microcavities: From the Polariton Doublet to an ac Stark Triplet

Francesco Quochi, Giovanni Bongiovanni, Andrea Mura, Jean Louis Staehli, B. Deveaud, Ross P. Stanley, U. Oesterlé, R. Houdré

Published May 25, 1998• 81 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report femtosecond pump and probe experiments in a semiconductor microcavity containing quantum wells. At high pump fields, the exciton-polariton Rabi doublet changes into a triplet structure. The triplet splitting increases as the square root of the input intensity. The transmitted probe intensity is modulated with the corresponding frequency versus pump-probe delay. The experimental results are discussed in terms of Mollow spectra of a saturated transition of a two-level system.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.80.4733

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We report femtosecond pump and probe experiments in a semiconductor microcavity containing quantum wells. At high pump fields, the exciton-polariton Rabi doublet changes into a triplet structure. The triplet splitting increases as the square root of the input intensity. The transmitted probe intensity is modulated with the corresponding frequency versus pump-probe delay. The experimental results are discussed in terms of Mollow spectra of a saturated transition of a two-level system.
The coherent optical response of high quality microcavities containing quantum wells is investigated. The dynamics of the ac Stark effect is investigated by degenerate pump–probe experiments, by exciting the quantum well excitons at various intensities and detunings. The evolution from a simple dynamical excitonic Stark shift to a splitting is clearly observed, even when the excitation is degenerate with the continuum states. The experimental results agree well with the predictions of a theoretical model based on the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations.
We report on the optical response of a semiconductor microcavity featuring a strong exciton–photon coupling. The weak excitation regime is investigated experimentally by means of time-resolved transmission and four-wave mixing experiments. The influence of electronic disorder on the coherent exciton–photon dynamics is discussed in terms of the solutions of the Maxwell-Bloch equations. The high excitation regime is investigated by using transient sub-picosecond pump–probe experiments. Optical amplification of the probe beam (up to a factor of five), as well as a fundamental change of the optical spectra, have been found close to and above the exciton saturation density. The observed oscillations are corresponding to the Rabi frequency of the excitons in the pump field.
We study the coherent optical response of a very high-finesse microcavity with a single quantum well by means of degenerate subpicosecond pump-probe spectroscopy. The dynamics of the ac Stark effect versus pump intensity is investigated upon tuning the empty-cavity mode below and above the exciton transition energy, at the exciton continuum onset. The evolution from a simple dynamical excitonic shift to a dynamical splitting is clearly observed in both cases. The qualitative agreement with numerical calculations based on the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations is good.
Recent progress in vertical surface-emitting-laser-diode technology has raised considerable interest in cavity-QED effects in high-quality vertical semiconductor microcavities. When an excitonic transition and a single cavity mode are strongly coupled, the normal modes of the system are coupled modes split by the vacuum-Rabi frequency, corresponding in the time domain to an oscillation of the excitation between modes of exciton and photon character. Recently, the vacuum-Rabi splitting and preliminary observations of time-domain oscillation in semiconductor quantum microcavities have been reported.1,2 In this paper we investigate rigorously the time-domain vacuum-Rabi oscillation by femtosecond upconversion and pump-probe techniques.
Recently, several research groups have reported investigations of vacuum-field Rabi splittings (VRS) in the linear response of strongly coupled semiconductor microcavities [1-4]. We have previously reported on the dynamics of time-domain vacuum Rabi oscillations, which are most easily understood in the framework of cavity exciton-polaritons, in which the in-plane momentum k|| is conserved [2], so that at each k|| a single cavity mode interacts with only a single mode of the electromagnetic field (Jaynes-Cummings model). In high Q semiconductor microcavities, the strong coupling between two-dimensional excitons and planar distributed- Bragg-reflector cavity modes results in several-meV splittings observable in the reflectivity or absorption spectrum. In the low excitation regime, the VRS is independent of light intensity incident on the cavity, since the vacuum-Rabi frequency exceeds the externally-driven Rabi frequency (in which case the Jaynes-Cummings model is equivalent to the linear dispersion of the coupled exciton-cavity system). As the incident light intensity is increased, two different effects may be expected to contribute to the nonlinear response. First, as long as the excitonic absorption is equivalent to a two-level system, higher-lying states of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder might be observable. Second, at high intensity phase-space filling and Coulomb screening of the exciton states results in a reduced oscillator strength which leads to a reduced VRS; this effect has no analogue in the case of atom-cavity systems. In this paper, we apply several ultrafast nonlinear techniques to investigate the nonlinear response of semiconductor microcavities.
Optical interband excitonic absorption of semiconductor quantum wells (QW’s) driven by a coherent pump field is investigated on the basis of semiconductor Bloch equations. The pump field has a photon energy close to the intersubband spacing between the first two conduction subbands in the QW’s. An external weak optical field probes the interband transition. The excitonic effects and pump-induced population redistribution within the conduction subbands in the QW system are included. When the density of the electron–hole pairs in the QW structure is low, the pump field induces an Autler–Townes splitting of the exciton absorption spectrum. The split size and the peak positions of the absorption doublet depend not only on the pump frequency and intensity but also on the carrier density. As the density of the electron–hole pairs is increased, the split contrast (the ratio between the maximum and the minimum values) is decreased, because the exciton effect is suppressed at higher densities owing to the many-body screening.