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IEEE Photonics Technology Letters

Excited-state gain dynamics in InGaAs quantum-dot amplifiers

Stephan Schneider, Paola Borri, W. Langbein, U. Woggon, Roman L. Sellin, D. Ouyang, D. Bimberg

Published Sep 26, 2005• 85 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The ultrafast gain recovery dynamics of the first excited state (ES) is studied in an electrically pumped InGaAs quantum-dot amplifier at room temperature and compared with the ground-state (GS) gain dynamics. Pump-probe differential transmission experiments are performed in heterodyne detection and the gain dynamics are investigated as a function of injection current. An ultrafast (<200 fs) initial gain recovery of both GS and ES transition is found, promising for optical signal processing at high bit rates. The obtained results suggest the occurrence of a fast recovery of the state occupation mediated by carrier-carrier scattering as long as a reservoir of carriers in the ESs and wetting layer is present.

DOI
10.1109/lpt.2005.856446

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The ultrafast gain recovery dynamics of the first excited state (ES) is studied in an electrically pumped InGaAs quantum-dot amplifier at room temperature and compared with the ground-state (GS) gain dynamics. Pump-probe differential transmission experiments are performed in heterodyne detection and the gain dynamics are investigated as a function of injection current. An ultrafast (<200 fs) initial gain recovery of both GS and ES transition is found, promising for optical signal processing at high bit rates. The obtained results suggest the occurrence of a fast recovery of the state occupation mediated by carrier-carrier scattering as long as a reservoir of carriers in the ESs and wetting layer is present.
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Gain recovery dynamics are studied in electrically pumped quantum dot (QD) based semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) after amplification of double femtosecond laser pulses using ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy with heterodyne detection. The authors observe a distinct change in gain recovery in the ground state when a significant excited state population is achieved. A complete gain recovery is found when two 150fs pulses with 5ps time delay pass through the SOA in resonance to the ground state under high injection currents of 80–100mA. The obtained results open the way for ultrafast (>200GHz) operation in p-doped QD based SOAs at 1.3μm telecommunications wavelengths.
We present an extensive experimental study of the exciton relaxation and dephasing in InGaAs quantum dots (QDs) in the temperature range from 10 K to 295 K. The QDs are embedded in the active region of an electrically pumped semiconductor optical amplifier. Ultrafast four-wave mixing and differential transmission spectroscopy on the dot ground-state transition are performed with a sensitive heterodyne detection technique. The importance of the population relaxation dynamics to the dephasing is determined as a function of injection current and temperature. Above 150 K dephasing processes much faster than the population relaxation are present, due to both carrier-phonon scattering and Coulomb interaction with the injected carriers. Only at low temperatures (<30 K) does population relaxation of multiexcitons in the gain regime fully determine the dephasing.
We measured the ultrafast gain recovery dynamics of the ground-state transition in an ensemble of electrically pumped InGaAs/GaAs quantum dots having a nonequilibrium carrier distribution prepared by an optical prepump pulse. We find that the gain recovery dynamics after optical depletion by the prepump is faster than without prepump, an effect most pronounced at low temperature (15 K) but observable up to room temperature. This finding is not consistent with a mean-field description of the carrier distribution and gives direct evidence that microstates with discrete carrier numbers determine the macroscopic response. The observed dynamics results from a conditional recovery where microstates with an internal relaxation slower than the depletion lead time are selectively suppressed.
The gain and phase dynamics of a high quality quantum dot semiconductor optical amplifier were measured at various wavelengths. In the ground state (GS), the amplitude of the slow component was negligible and the fast dominant gain recovery time was 0.7 ps. In the excited state (ES), the slow component was not negligible although small. The time required to recover from 90% to 10% was 2.0 ps in the GS but gradually increased to 31 ps in the ES. This finding predicts no pattern effects in the GS, but finite pattern effects in the ES.