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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Cavity solitons in semiconductor resonators: role of many-particle effects

Dirk Michaelis, Ulf Peschel, F. Lederer

Published Jan 1, 1998• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Summary form only given. Owing to their robustness and potential applications in all-optical information transmission, processing, and storage schemes, there is growing interest in optical solitons. Recently, it was shown that bright solitons can exist in semiconductor Fabry-Perot resonators at accessible power levels. These cavity solitons or soliton pixels may serve as basic units in information storage systems because they can be easily and individually set and erased. In previous studies, it was assumed that the photon energy is near the exciton resonance. For these energy levels and high carrier densities, an effective two-level system approach that relates the complex susceptibility changes linearly to the carrier density is appropriate. If one reduces the photon energy further, many-particle effects come into play, and the linear dependence ceases to hold. In this work, we use an appropriate, phenomenological material model that accounts for all prominent many-particle effects such as exciton formation, screening, gap renormalization, and band filling. It turns out that the diversity of soliton structures is richer than previously demonstrated.

DOI
10.1109/cleo.1998.676354

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Optics Letters•Feb 6, 2008•39 citations
Summary form only given. Owing to their robustness and potential applications in all-optical information transmission, processing, and storage schemes, there is growing interest in optical solitons. Recently, it was shown that bright solitons can exist in semiconductor Fabry-Perot resonators at accessible power levels. These cavity solitons or soliton pixels may serve as basic units in information storage systems because they can be easily and individually set and erased. In previous studies, it was assumed that the photon energy is near the exciton resonance. For these energy levels and high carrier densities, an effective two-level system approach that relates the complex susceptibility changes linearly to the carrier density is appropriate. If one reduces the photon energy further, many-particle effects come into play, and the linear dependence ceases to hold. In this work, we use an appropriate, phenomenological material model that accounts for all prominent many-particle effects such as exciton formation, screening, gap renormalization, and band filling. It turns out that the diversity of soliton structures is richer than previously demonstrated.
Optical bistability and bright and dark resonator solitons exist in semiconductor resonator at room temperature [C.O. Weis and Ye. Larionova, Rep. Prog. Phys. 70 (2007) 255-335], with the usual semiconductor nonlinearity. At low temperature in the strong coupling regime between quantum well excitons and the optical field in a semiconductor microcavity the nonlinearities are strong and based on “polariton nonlinearity”. The strong coupling results in a quasi-particle “exciton-polariton” which gives access to positive and negative reactive and dissipative optical nonlinearities, as opposed to the usual room temperature semiconductor nonlinearities possessing essentially only one sign. The type of nonlinearity and the properties of solitons can be varied widely by the detuning between the photon- and exciton resonances. We show for the first time experimentally the existence of patterns, bright and dark solitons based on polariton nonlinearity. 1. INTRODUCTION Bright and dark spatial solitons were shown to exist in such microresonators with and without population inversion [1-3]. At room temperature the nonlinearity which is at the origin of the soliton existence is the usual mixed absorptive/refractive semiconductor nonlinearity which can have transverse effects (e.g. self-focusing) and longitudinal effects such as nonlinear resonance, both ingredients for soliton stability. At low temperature (or at large exciton binding energies) the exciton, which merges with the absorption band at room temperature, is well separated spectrally from the absorption band so that the nonlinearity becomes that of a 2-level system. If the exciton resonance is strongly coupled with the field inside a resonator the exciton- and the photon resonances mix. At coincidence of the two resonance frequencies, the photon- and the exciton resonances hybridize in an avoided crossing and the two hybrid resonances are ascribed to a quasi-particle, the excitonpolariton. This quasi-particle has unusual optical properties. E.g. is the photon nonlinearity determined by exciton collisions. That the exciton-polariton system has interesting nonlinearities (e.g. induced absorption as opposed to the usual saturable absorption) has been shown previously [4]. It was realized that semiconductor microresonators in the strong field-exciton coupling regime might show optical bistability and first experimental proofs for bistability were given recently [5]. As optical bistability of a resonator is a precondition for the existence of spatial resonator solitons, the question arises whether semiconductor microresonators with polariton nonlinearity can support spatial resonator solitons, which, as a consequence of the large nonlinearity of the polaritons, could be expected to exist at rather small light intensities, as it is of importance for all applications. 2. EXPERIMENTAL ARRANGEMENT AND RESULTS The cooled resonator sample (4 K) is illuminated by light at the polariton resonance wavelengths, and the light reflected from the resonator is observed. The light source is a Ar
We review the nonlinear-optical effects observed at room temperature in semiconductor quantum-well structures photoexcited near the band gap. A comprehensive discussion of optical transitions in these microstructures is given, including excitonic effects and the specific features of room-temperature exciton resonances. Experimental investigations using continuous-wave, picosecond-, and femtosecond-laser sources are presented. They show extremely efficient nonlinear processes. In the case of excitations that are long compared with the exciton-ionization time, the induced changes in absorption and refraction do not depend on the wavelength or on the duration of excitation. These changes depend only on the density of absorbed photons and are interpreted in terms of electron–hole plasma screening and band filling. In contrast, for ultrashort excitation, nonlinear processes depend critically on the excitation wavelength. The selective generation of excitons is found to produce effects larger than a plasma of the same density. This unexpected result is shown to arise from the low temperature of the exciton gas before it interacts with the lattice and from the decrease of screening that is the reduced dimensionality of quantum-well structures.
Bright and dark spatial solitons are observed in an optically pumped semiconductor resonator. The pumping allows us to reduce considerably the light intensity necessary for the existence of the solitons and alleviates thermal load problems. Experiments are found to agree qualitatively with calculations based on a simple large-aperture semiconductor resonator model. The role of the signs of the absorptive and reactive nonlinearities in soliton existence is discussed in relation to the nonlinear resonance effect, the tilted-wave mechanism of pattern formation, and the sign of the population inversion.
Propagation of light beams in a Fabry-Perot resonator filled with a self-focusing Kerr material is described by the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. If the degrees of freedom are restricted to one transverse dimension through the use of a line focus at the input face, the system possesses classical soliton solutions analogous to those for travelling-wave self-trapped beams. When the classical field theory is quantized, one obtains an effective nonrelativistic many-body field theory in which pairs of photons interact through attractive delta function potentials. The existence of bound states between photons is the microscopic phenomenon that prevents beams from spreading by diffraction. The fundamental bound state consists of two photons, which we call the "diphoton." We consider production of these quasi-particles in a single longitudinal mode Fabry-Perot resonator filled with an alkali vapor. The injected light is strongly attenuated to excite few photons in the cavity and is detuned slightly above the atomic resonance, giving rise to the self-focusing nonlinearity. Detection of the diphoton can be achieved by rejecting the unbound component by using a spatial filter and detecting the remaining signal in coincidence counting. The diphoton signature is a characteristic Lorentzian-squared two-point correlation profile.1
We show experimentally optical bistability and the existence of bright and dark resonator solitons in the strong coupling regime between quantum-well excitons and the optical field in a semiconductor microcavity. The strong coupling results in a quasi-particle exciton-polariton, which gives access to positive and negative reactive and dissipative optical nonlinearities, as opposed to the usual room temperature semiconductor nonlinearities possessing essentially only one sign. The existence range and the properties of solitons can be varied widely by the detuning between polariton states and light frequency.