Electric Field-Induced Enhancement and Inhibition of Excitonic Spontaneous Emission in GaAs Quantum Wells Embedded in Quantum Micro-Cavities,
N. Ochi, Y. Honda, M. Yamanishi +2 more
Abstract : Spontaneous emission of an atom is not an immutable property of an atom but can be controlled by modification of the vacuum field fluctuations surrounding the atom. In fact, inhibition and enhancement of spontaneous emission of atoms both at microwave and optical frequencies have been demonstrated experimentally. It has, also, been demonstrated that spontaneous emission from GaAs quantum wells (QWs) is altered by embedding the QWs between AlAs/AlGaAs distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). Such an artificial modification of the spontaneous emission in semiconductor micro-structures is very important, particularly from device use point of view. We may, also expect enhancement and inhibition of spontaneous emission induced by tuning of emission wavelength of atoms or active materials embedded in fixed micro-cavities, instead of variation of micro-cavity structures. In this paper, we demonstrate, for the first time, controllable enhancement and inhibition of excitonic spontaneous emission by dc electric fields applied to a GaAs QW embedded in a pair of AlAs/AlGaAs DBRs.
•May 22, 1992•1 citation