Optically-pumped semiconductor squeezed-light generation

Philippe B. Gallion, Francine Jérémie, J.-L. Vey

E. Giacobino

Emil V. Denning, Andreas Knorr, Florian Katsch +1 more

Nonlinear optical effects such as four-wave mixing and generation of squeezed light are ubiquitous in optical devices and light sources. For new devices operating at low optical power, the resonant nonlinearity arising from the two-photon sensitive bound biexciton in a semiconductor microcavity is an interesting prospective platform. Due to the particularly strong Coulomb interaction in atomically thin semiconductors, these materials have strongly bound biexcitons and operate in the visible frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum. To remove the strong pump laser from the generated light in optical devices or to simultaneously excite nondegenerate polaritons, a bichromatic-pump configuration with two spectrally separated pump lasers is desirable. In this paper, we theoretically investigate spontaneous four-wave mixing and quadrature-squeezing in a bichromatically pumped atomically thin semiconductor microcavity. We explore two different configurations that support degenerate and nondegenerate scattering from polaritons into bound biexcitons, respectively. We find that these configurations lead to the generation of strongly single- and two-mode quadrature-squeezed light.

Y. Yamamoto

John E. Kitching, Amnon Yariv, Yaakov Shevy

Amplitude-squeezed states are generated from a room-temperature semiconductor laser using a combination of pump suppression and dispersive optical feedback. The laser amplitude noise is found to be sensitive to extremely weak feedback levels, of the order of 10-8 of the output power. a reduction of the noise from 2% below the standard quantum limit (SQL) under free-running conditions to 19% below the SQL under optimal feedback conditions is obtained. A single mode theory is presented but is found to be inadequate in explaining the measured dependence of the noise reduction on the feedback power. A multimode theory including asymmetrical cross-mode nonlinear gain is proposed to explain this discrepancy.

J.F. Ryan, M. B. Ward, J. Brown