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Applied Physics Letters

Theoretical explanation of the absorptive optical bistability in semiconductors due to band-gap shrinkage

H. E. Schmidt, H. Haug, S. W. Koch

Published Apr 15, 1984• 64 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The creation of an electron-hole plasma in a semiconductor leads to a large band-gap shrinkage which can be used to obtain absorptive optical bistability caused by discontinuous jumps between states of weak band-tail absorption and states of strong band-edge absorption. These effects are described by rate equations for the photons and the free carriers. For CdS the calculated hysteresis phenomena are similar to the experimental results.

DOI
10.1063/1.94886

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The creation of an electron-hole plasma in a semiconductor leads to a large band-gap shrinkage which can be used to obtain absorptive optical bistability caused by discontinuous jumps between states of weak band-tail absorption and states of strong band-edge absorption. These effects are described by rate equations for the photons and the free carriers. For CdS the calculated hysteresis phenomena are similar to the experimental results.
Within the framework of a simple numerical model, we investigate the optical properties of a laser-excited direct-band-gap semiconductor (CdS) in the case when both free and bound electron-hole pairs are present. At low temperatures the ionization of excitons proceeds via a first-order phase transition, which is closely related to the Mott transition, and we argue that in direct-band-gap semiconductors it is not suppressed by the electron-hole liquid condensation, as it is in indirect-band-gap materials. The existence of the two corresponding ionization phases with different optical properties is shown to result in optical bistability (OB), which is quite similar to the increasing-absorption (resonatorless) OB but has some peculiarities of its own. Our model also predicts another optical manifestation of this ionization phase transition---the possibility of absorption oscillations at resonant excitation of excitons.
Nonlinear optical properties of laser-excited semiconductors are discussed, and the applications to optical bistability and optical logic are reviewed. The physical origin of the nonlinearities is analyzed in terms of the many-body interactions in the system of electron-hole pairs, causing effects such as plasma screening of the Coulomb interaction, band-gap renormalization, and band filling. Theoretical results for absorption and refractive-index spectra are compared to experimental data obtained for room-temperature GaAs and other semiconductors. The experimental and theoretical results for dispersive optical bistability in semiconductors are summarized, and recent experiments on optical logic gating and pattern recognition are discussed.
Semiconductors exhibit large optical nonlinearities near the band edge because of resonance enhancement. Optical bistability occurs when the optical nonlinearities are coupled with feedback. In bulk GaAs and GaAs–AlGaAs multiple-quantum-well superlattices, the nonlinearity arising from the presence of the free-exciton resonance has produced room-temperature optical bistability with a few milliwatts of power. The formation of biexcitons in CuCl, the saturation of the bound exciton on CdS, and band-filling effects in InSb, InAs, and HgCdTe lead to observation of bistability in these materials. A bistable etalon can be operated in an optical-gate mode to generate optical analogs of electronic gates such as and, or, and nor. It has been demonstrated that a GaAs optical NOR gate responds in ∼1 psec, using only ≲3 pJ of energy. However, because of the carrier lifetime of a few nanoseconds, the repetition rate of the NOR gate is now limited to a few hundred megahertz.