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Physical Review B

Phase control of electron population, absorption, and dispersion properties of a semiconductor quantum well

J. F. Dynes, Emmanuel Paspalakis

Published Jun 16, 2006• 91 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show that an asymmetric semiconductor quantum well that forms a three-level cascade configuration can be controlled by the relative phase of a laser field and its second harmonic. The electron population in the three subbands and the probe absorption/dispersion spectra are crucially phase dependent. As an example, electron inversion between the upper and lower subbands and change of the spectrum from absorption to gain is found by solely varying the relative phase of the two fields.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.73.233305

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We show that an asymmetric semiconductor quantum well that forms a three-level cascade configuration can be controlled by the relative phase of a laser field and its second harmonic. The electron population in the three subbands and the probe absorption/dispersion spectra are crucially phase dependent. As an example, electron inversion between the upper and lower subbands and change of the spectrum from absorption to gain is found by solely varying the relative phase of the two fields.
The authors designed an asymmetric double quantum well structure with three subbands in the conduction band,and then calculated energy values of the three subbands with the effective-mass Schrodinger equation of confined electrons.In particular,the two adjacent excited subbands were correlated to wave function due to the electronic tunneling effect.A weak probe field coupling the ground subband to the two excited subbands was found to have a double-peak absorption spectrum with an in-between transparency window.Applying a DC electric field on this double quantum well structure,one may easily change the ratio of dipole moments on the two probe transitions,and then effectively manipulate relative amplitudes of the two absorption peaks and the dispersion curve in the transparency window.
We present two examples of coherent control of inter(sub)band transitions in a semiconductor double well by coherent light sources. Accounting for the upper hole subband and two lowest electron subbands, a microscopic theoretical analysis shows that electron‐hole pair generation by a sub‐picosecond pump pulse can be controlled by the intensity and the phase of a dc microwave field which resonantly couples the two electron subbands. Light absorption can be either enhanced or reduced. Secondly, it is shown that proper combination of two pulsed laser fields allows control of electron inter(sub)band transitions and final‐state population, i.e., the formation of indirect versus direct excitons.
We study electronic transitions between a subband and a lower subband doublet which is driven by a coherent microwave (MW) field in a semiconductor double well structure. Within a microscopic three-band model, we show that variation of the MW phase allows manipulation of the optical gain provided the probe pulse duration is shorter than the period of the MW-field-generated interband polarization in the doublet. Moreover, we find that optical gain without inversion can be achieved in spite of subpicosecond dissipative mechanisms provided by electron-phonon coupling and electron tunneling into and out of the double well.
We have studied two-dimensional absorption and gain spectrum in an asymmetric semiconductor triple-coupled-quantum-well (TCQW) nanostructure. Four subband transitions are coupled by using four coherent fields in a close-loop configuration to introduce cross-Kerr effect and four-wave-mixing (FWM) induced nonlinearity in achieving nonlinear absorption and gain profiles. Position-dependent absorption and gain are obtained by applying one, or two coherent fields in a variety of standing wave configurations including superposed field configuration in the standing-wave regime. In addition to the control parameters like Rabi frequency and detuning, the specialty of the model is to employ double-controlled spatial phase-coherence guided by the FWM-induced phase and the phases introduced by the standing wave formation. Our results highlight the high-precision electron localization in spatial domain. The evolution of spatially modulated gain without inversion may be a substitute for obtaining gain from a traditional quantum cascade laser. The importance of the present work is to find its application in designing electro-optic modulators in semiconductor nanostructures in near future.
In a self-consistent field formalism we investigated the weak-probe optical intersubband response of a three-subband semiconductor quantum well pumped by a strong coherent laser beam. We showed that, when the pumping photon energy is somewhat above the energy separation between the two lowest subbands, a combination of hole-burning effects and coherent pump–probe wave interactions can lead to both optical gain without population inversion and an Autler–Townes-like doublet in the probe optical spectrum. These two absorption peaks, whose positions are blueshifted as the pump intensity is increased, are due to the two-photon absorption process and light-induced intersubband transitions between the two upper states. It is also demonstrated that, in a stepwise two-photon pumping scheme, the optical gain with population inversion can also occur in the quantum-well system when a modestly strong pump field is present.