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Le Journal de Physique Colloques

OPTICAL BISTABILITY, REGENERATIVE PULSATIONS, AND TRANSVERSE EFFECTS IN ROOM-TEMPERATURE GaAs-AlGaAs SUPERLATTICE ETALONS

H. M. Gibbs, Jack L. Jewell, Jerome V. Moloney, Kuochou Tai, S. S. Tarng, Doreen A. Weinberger, Arthur C. Gossard, S. L. McCall, A. Passner, W. Weigmann

Published Mar 1, 1983• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The quantum wells provided by a superlattice increase the binding energy of free excitons in GaAs, permitting 300 K bistable operation. Thermal and excitonic refractive index effects compete, resulting in regenerative pulsations. Transverse observations and simulations provide other interesting effects.
DOI
10.1051/jphyscol:1983225

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An analysis of static room-temperature-operation characteristics of a reflection-mode semiconductor multiple-quantum well etalon by a simplified two-level system formula of optical nonlinear properties and a computer simulation is presented. In the calculation for a GaAs/AlGaAs multiple-quantum-well etalon using the parameters reported in experimental measurement, it is shown that the very large excitonic optical nonlinearity is not effectively utilized for the optical bistable operation. This occurs because the effective positive-feedback mechanism which increases the etalon internal light intensity is suppressed when a hardly saturable background interband absorption tail is larger than a few thousand cm/sup -1/ at a wavelength where the large excitonic dispersive nonlinearity is observed.>
Optical bistable devices containing GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum well (MQW) structures have shown great potential for performing fast low-power optical switching at room temperature.1 The presence of a much stronger exciton absorption feature in the MQW structures compared to bulk GaAs suggests far superior performance in the former. We report the observation of room-temperature bistability in bulk GaAs with input power <10 mW and intensities of a few kW/cm2. The intensities are consistent with the data of Miller et al.2 which show a saturation intensity of nearly 4 kW/cm2 in a MQW sample with a detuning of less than a halfwidth from the peak of the exciton resonance. Our detunings are always several halfwidths.
Self-focusing effects in optical bistable hysteresis loops have been observed in a GaAs-GaAlAs superlattice.1 Experimentally, one sees drastic overshooting in the hysteresis loops and changes in the output profile as the imaging lens is translated along the propagation direction, thus imaging different object planes onto a fixed image plane (i.e. aperture). Nearly identical results are found by a one-transverse-dimension numerical simulation of good-cavity bistability in which the output is free-space propagated backwards in space, corresponding to the movement of the imaging lens. These effects arise from a radially-dependent phase shift caused by the excitonic nonlinear refraction and a gaussian beam profile.