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Optics Letters

Mechanism for enhanced optical nonlinearities and bistability by combined dielectric–electronic confinement in semiconductor microcrystallites

D. S. Chemla, David A. B. Miller

Published Aug 1, 1986• 106 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a new type of mechanism for enhanced optical nonlinearities and intrinsic optical bistability that relies on the combination of intrinsic feedback due to local field effects and excitonic resonances in semiconductor crystallites. These effects will be further enhanced by quantum confinement in small crystallites.
DOI
10.1364/ol.11.000522

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The main mechanisms for the observed large optical nonlinearities in semiconductors are briefly discussed and illustrated for the example of the exciton ionization by plasma screening. These nonlinearities cause various types of optical bistability, either of intrinsic nature or evoked by an additional resonator feedback. Under certain operation conditions also higher instabilities such as oscillations and chaos can be obtained. As an example, the self-pulsing of an induced absorber in a ring cavity is treated. The resulting locked oscillations are shown to follow a Farey-tree scenarium.
Current interest in the optical behavior of semiconductor microcrystallites or boxes stems from their potential use in optical signal processing operations. Understanding of the fundamental mechanisms1-3 as well as the limitations to optical devices4,5 is still being considered actively. This paper reports the results of our studies of the nonlinear optics of excitons confined to zero dimension and examines its manifestation on the phenomena of dynamic Stark effect, optical phase conjugation, and two-beam coupling.
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.