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1.5 µm Quantum Dots Spectral Hole Burning experiments for dual frequency laser engineering

Gaëlle Brévalle, Mathieu Perrin, Cyril Paranthoën, Yoan Léger, Christophe Levallois, Hervé Folliot, Mehdi Alouini

Published Jul 29, 2018• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The Terahertz (THz) frequency domain is attractive for numerous applications including phonon spectroscopy, radio-astronomy, imaging, sensing and communication. Nevertheless the development of a compact, tunable, electrically driven room-temperature source operating in the THz band frequency [1-5 THz] remains a challenge. An alternative to low-temperature-cooled Quantum Cascade Lasers is the widely investigated photomixing technique which relies on semiconductor antenna fed by two laser fields beating at the targeted THz frequency. When a highly coherent CW emission is mandatory, a single laser cavity sustaining the oscillation of the two required laser fields is a very attractive approach. Indeed, the phase noises of the two optical fields being inherently correlated, the beatnote exhibits a high spectral purity. Following this paradigm, dual-frequency Quantum Wells (QWs) based Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VECSELs) architectures have been successfully demonstrated [1][2][3]. Nevertheless, because of the inherent homogeneously broadened gain of QWs, the two laser modes suffer from strong coupling making it necessary to lift the spatial degeneracy inside the active medium. Moreover, the frequency detuning remains lower than in Quantum Dots (QDs). Accordingly, we have been exploring over the past years the benefits of using wider and potentially less homogeneously broadened gain medium such as Quantum Dots. To this aim, InAs QDs are grown on InP (311B) substrate, and characterized by photoluminescence and atomic force microscopy. The density (from 10^10 to 10^11 cm-2) and the size of QDs are carefully engineered while keeping a 1550 nm emission wavelength. To evaluate the potential of QDs for dual frequency oscillation, a critical parameter is the homogeneous linewidth. It is measured through Spectral Hole Burning (SHB) experiments using two tunable and continuous-wave lasers. In order to be as close as possible to the laser operation conditions, the SHB experiments are performed at high temperature levels and high carrier densities. In this talk, we will present our preliminary results from Spectral Hole Burning experiments conducted on both InAs/InP QDs and conventional InGaAs/InP QWs. The dedicated homemade measurement apparatus will be presented as well. This work is supported by the IDYLIC ANR project (ANR-15-CE24-0034-01).

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LASER FREQUENCY STABILIZATION TO SPECTRAL HOLE BURNING FREQUENCY REFERENCES IN ERBIUM-DOPED CRYSTALS: MATERIAL AND DEVICE OPTIMIZATION

Thomas Böttger

Narrow spectral holes in the absorption lines of Er doped crystals have been explored as references for frequency stabilizing external cavity diode lasers at the important 1.5 μm optical communication wavelength. Allan deviations of the beat signal between two independent stabilized lasers as low as 200 Hz over 10 ms integration time have been achieved using regenerative spectral holes in Er:Y2SiO5 and Er:KTP, while drift was reduced to ~ 7 kHz/min by incorporating the inhomogeneous absorption line as a fixed reference. During active stabilization, the transient spectral hole was continuously regenerated as hole burning balanced relaxation. In contrast, persistent spectral holes in Er:D:CaF2, with lifetimes of several weeks, provided programmable and transportable secondary frequency references that maintained sub-kilohertz stability over several seconds and enabled 6 kHz stability over 3 1.6 10 s × . The error signal was derived from the spectral hole transmission using frequency modulation spectroscopy. A servo amplifier applied fast frequency corrections to the injection current of the laser diode and slower adjustments to the piezo-driven feedback prism plate. These stabilized lasers provide ideal sources for spectral hole burning applications based on optical coherent transients, where laser stability is required over the storage time of the material. Since the lifetime of the frequency reference is exactly the material storage time, this requirement is automatically met by using our technique. This was demonstrated in Er:Y2SiO5 and successfully transferred to high-bandwidth signal processing applications. The material Er:Y2SiO5 was optimized for these applications. The I15/2 and I13/2 crystal field levels were site-selectively determined by absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy. The excited state lifetime was measured to be 11.4 ms for site 1 and 9.2 ms for site 2. Zeeman experiments and two-pulse photon echo spectroscopy as a function of magnetic field orientation were used to determine the anisotropic electronic g-values for both Er sites and established a preferred magnetic field orientation for minimizing homogeneous line broadening by spectral diffusion. The spectral diffusion was characterized by stimulated photon echo spectroscopy and successfully described with established theories. In a 0.02 atomic percent Er:Y2SiO5 crystal at B = 0.8 T and T = 1.6 K, line broadening became significant after 10 μs, increasing the homogeneous linewidth from 7.5 kHz to 75 kHz after 120 μs. Spectral diffusion, primarily caused by direct phonon driven Er spin-flips in the ground state, can be controlled to negligible levels with proper magnetic field strength and orientation, temperature, and erbium concentration. In optimizing Er:Y2SiO5, the narrowest optical resonance in any solid-state material of 73 Hz was measured.

•Jan 1, 2002•15 citations

High-resolution spectral hole burning in InGaAs-GaAs quantum dots

Joseph J. Berry, Martin J. Stevens, Richard P. Mirin +1 more

We report the use of continuous wave spectral hole burning to perform high-resolution spectroscopy of the homogeneous linewidth of self-assembled InGaAs-GaAs quantum dots at low temperature. We use this technique to examine the power broadening behavior of the homogeneous InGaAs-GaAs quantum dot line. We find that at a temperature of 9.8 K and over the majority of the pump powers considered, the spectral hole signal is well fit by a single Lorentizian line shape. Analysis of the power broadening yields a full width at half maximum of 0.74μeV for the homogeneous linewidth and a corresponding coherence time T2 of 1.76 ns.

Applied Physics Letters•Feb 6, 2006•26 citations

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D. T. Nguyen, Maria Tchernycheva, François Henri Julien +3 more

GaN/AlN quantum dots are semiconductor nanostructures where the huge conduction band offset of 1.75 eV leads to intraband transitions at exceptionnaly short wavelengths compared to III-As semiconductor materials. For specific quantum dot dimensions, it was shown that the absorption spectrum covers the optical communication spectral range. The ultrafast relaxation dynamics observed for these materials motivates the development of opto-electronic devices, and especially ultrafast switches. However, a detailed insight into the microscopic processes governing the relaxation dynamics is still missing although of fundamental importance for the understanding and the optimization of the devices operation. In particular, there is no study of the homogeneous broadening which drives the saturation properties of GaN/AlN quantum dots-devices. In this paper, we present homogeneous linewidth measurements by means of the nonlinear optical technique of spectral hole-burning. Spectrally-resolved pump-probe experiments with cw-lasers allow us to characterize the coherence relaxation dynamics down to 5K by resolving the homogeneous linewidth in an ensemble of GaN/AlN quantum dots. The differential transmission measured at 5K for a TM-polarized pump shows a pronounced bleaching with an amplitude of 2x10-4 on a background signal of 5x10-5. According to the selection rules of the s-pz intraband transition in GaN/AlN QDs, we attribute the photoinduced increase of the probe transmission to the partial saturation of the quantum dots by the pump laser, and we deduce a homogeneous linewidth of 15 meV at 5K. We find that the differential transmission signal scales like the square-root of the incident pump power, thus revealing the importance of electron-electron scattering in the population relaxation dynamics. As a matter of fact, we find that the population relaxation from the pz excited state is predominantly governed by Auger-type processes whereas optical phonon emission only plays a minor role, even if it may contribute to secondary processes during the carrier cascade to the fundamental s state via intermediate confined states.

•Oct 15, 2012•0 citations

Spectral hole burning of InAs self-assembled quantum dots written by two different lasers

Yoshihiro Sugiyama, Yoshihiro Nakata, Shunichi Muto +2 more

We report, for the first time, the two spectral holes in photocurrent of InAs self-assembled quantum dots embedded in a p-i-n diode irradiated by two different lasers. The estimated homogeneous broadening of less than 30 /spl mu/ eV for InAs QD implies the possibility of wavelength multiplicity of /spl ges/2800 for hole burning memory using QD. The spectral hole width irradiated by single mode YAG laser at 1064 nm showed temperature dependence of exp(T/30.9) in the range from 5 K to 80 K.

Technical digest - International Electron Devices Meeting/Technical digest•Nov 28, 2002•1 citation

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Persistent spectral-hole-burning (PSHB) phenomena have been observed in many kinds of semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). Luminescence hole burning and charged excitons have been observed in CuCl QDs in NaCl crystals. The observed PSHB phenomena are explained by the ionization of QDs. The energy of photoionized QDs is changed from the original energy and their new energies depend on the spatial arrangement of trapped carriers. Quantum confinement of carriers and the resulting strong Coulomb interaction between confined carriers and trapped carriers cause the energy change. PSHB has been widely applied to site-selective spectroscopy of QDs. Size-dependent excited exciton quantum states in CuCl quantum cubes, size-dependent excited electron-hole quantum states in CdTe QDs and renormalization of longitudinal optical phonons confined in CuCl QDs have been revealed by studying sideband holes. This also allowed the measurement of accumulated photon echo, which clarified the very sharp homogeneous spectral linewidth of QDs under weak excitation conditions.

Japanese Journal of Applied Physics•Jan 1, 1999•4 citations

Fast Light in Quantum Dot and Well Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

Connie J. Chang-Hasnain, P. Bhattacharya, S. L. Chuang

Abstract : Slow and fast light schemes are attractive for many applications including optical signal processing and RF phased array antennas. Semiconductor based schemes offer electrical control of velocity at very high bandwidths in an extremely compact device. Further they operate at room temperature and can be easily integrated into various optical systems. In this program, we used ultrafast nonlinearities in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) to achieve tunable time shifts at THz frequencies. In particular, we leveraged the spectral hole burning phenomena and demonstrated fast light in quantum well (QW) and quantum dot (QD) SOAs. The research included both theoretical and experimental efforts. Theoretical work was developed to understand and simulate experimental results and to optimize device designs. We introduced a novel pulse compression technique to reduce the pulse width to 100 fs to efficiently use ultra-fast nonlinearities in SOAs to achieve a large and cascadable delay. We implemented a novel chirped pulse scheme and obtained the largest advance-pulse-product of 10.7 with THz bandwidth. We demonstrated slow and fast light with GHz RF signal in QW/QD SOAs using coherent population oscillation and four-wave mixing. We also demonstrated cascaded SOAs in a loop to scale up the delay/advance.

•Oct 31, 2010•0 citations
The Terahertz (THz) frequency domain is attractive for numerous applications including phonon spectroscopy, radio-astronomy, imaging, sensing and communication. Nevertheless the development of a compact, tunable, electrically driven room-temperature source operating in the THz band frequency [1-5 THz] remains a challenge. An alternative to low-temperature-cooled Quantum Cascade Lasers is the widely investigated photomixing technique which relies on semiconductor antenna fed by two laser fields beating at the targeted THz frequency. When a highly coherent CW emission is mandatory, a single laser cavity sustaining the oscillation of the two required laser fields is a very attractive approach. Indeed, the phase noises of the two optical fields being inherently correlated, the beatnote exhibits a high spectral purity. Following this paradigm, dual-frequency Quantum Wells (QWs) based Vertical External Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VECSELs) architectures have been successfully demonstrated [1][2][3]. Nevertheless, because of the inherent homogeneously broadened gain of QWs, the two laser modes suffer from strong coupling making it necessary to lift the spatial degeneracy inside the active medium. Moreover, the frequency detuning remains lower than in Quantum Dots (QDs). Accordingly, we have been exploring over the past years the benefits of using wider and potentially less homogeneously broadened gain medium such as Quantum Dots. To this aim, InAs QDs are grown on InP (311B) substrate, and characterized by photoluminescence and atomic force microscopy. The density (from 10^10 to 10^11 cm-2) and the size of QDs are carefully engineered while keeping a 1550 nm emission wavelength. To evaluate the potential of QDs for dual frequency oscillation, a critical parameter is the homogeneous linewidth. It is measured through Spectral Hole Burning (SHB) experiments using two tunable and continuous-wave lasers. In order to be as close as possible to the laser operation conditions, the SHB experiments are performed at high temperature levels and high carrier densities. In this talk, we will present our preliminary results from Spectral Hole Burning experiments conducted on both InAs/InP QDs and conventional InGaAs/InP QWs. The dedicated homemade measurement apparatus will be presented as well. This work is supported by the IDYLIC ANR project (ANR-15-CE24-0034-01).
Narrow spectral holes in the absorption lines of Er doped crystals have been explored as references for frequency stabilizing external cavity diode lasers at the important 1.5 μm optical communication wavelength. Allan deviations of the beat signal between two independent stabilized lasers as low as 200 Hz over 10 ms integration time have been achieved using regenerative spectral holes in Er:Y2SiO5 and Er:KTP, while drift was reduced to ~ 7 kHz/min by incorporating the inhomogeneous absorption line as a fixed reference. During active stabilization, the transient spectral hole was continuously regenerated as hole burning balanced relaxation. In contrast, persistent spectral holes in Er:D:CaF2, with lifetimes of several weeks, provided programmable and transportable secondary frequency references that maintained sub-kilohertz stability over several seconds and enabled 6 kHz stability over 3 1.6 10 s × . The error signal was derived from the spectral hole transmission using frequency modulation spectroscopy. A servo amplifier applied fast frequency corrections to the injection current of the laser diode and slower adjustments to the piezo-driven feedback prism plate. These stabilized lasers provide ideal sources for spectral hole burning applications based on optical coherent transients, where laser stability is required over the storage time of the material. Since the lifetime of the frequency reference is exactly the material storage time, this requirement is automatically met by using our technique. This was demonstrated in Er:Y2SiO5 and successfully transferred to high-bandwidth signal processing applications. The material Er:Y2SiO5 was optimized for these applications. The I15/2 and I13/2 crystal field levels were site-selectively determined by absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy. The excited state lifetime was measured to be 11.4 ms for site 1 and 9.2 ms for site 2. Zeeman experiments and two-pulse photon echo spectroscopy as a function of magnetic field orientation were used to determine the anisotropic electronic g-values for both Er sites and established a preferred magnetic field orientation for minimizing homogeneous line broadening by spectral diffusion. The spectral diffusion was characterized by stimulated photon echo spectroscopy and successfully described with established theories. In a 0.02 atomic percent Er:Y2SiO5 crystal at B = 0.8 T and T = 1.6 K, line broadening became significant after 10 μs, increasing the homogeneous linewidth from 7.5 kHz to 75 kHz after 120 μs. Spectral diffusion, primarily caused by direct phonon driven Er spin-flips in the ground state, can be controlled to negligible levels with proper magnetic field strength and orientation, temperature, and erbium concentration. In optimizing Er:Y2SiO5, the narrowest optical resonance in any solid-state material of 73 Hz was measured.
We report the use of continuous wave spectral hole burning to perform high-resolution spectroscopy of the homogeneous linewidth of self-assembled InGaAs-GaAs quantum dots at low temperature. We use this technique to examine the power broadening behavior of the homogeneous InGaAs-GaAs quantum dot line. We find that at a temperature of 9.8 K and over the majority of the pump powers considered, the spectral hole signal is well fit by a single Lorentizian line shape. Analysis of the power broadening yields a full width at half maximum of 0.74μeV for the homogeneous linewidth and a corresponding coherence time T2 of 1.76 ns.
GaN/AlN quantum dots are semiconductor nanostructures where the huge conduction band offset of 1.75 eV leads to intraband transitions at exceptionnaly short wavelengths compared to III-As semiconductor materials. For specific quantum dot dimensions, it was shown that the absorption spectrum covers the optical communication spectral range. The ultrafast relaxation dynamics observed for these materials motivates the development of opto-electronic devices, and especially ultrafast switches. However, a detailed insight into the microscopic processes governing the relaxation dynamics is still missing although of fundamental importance for the understanding and the optimization of the devices operation. In particular, there is no study of the homogeneous broadening which drives the saturation properties of GaN/AlN quantum dots-devices. In this paper, we present homogeneous linewidth measurements by means of the nonlinear optical technique of spectral hole-burning. Spectrally-resolved pump-probe experiments with cw-lasers allow us to characterize the coherence relaxation dynamics down to 5K by resolving the homogeneous linewidth in an ensemble of GaN/AlN quantum dots. The differential transmission measured at 5K for a TM-polarized pump shows a pronounced bleaching with an amplitude of 2x10-4 on a background signal of 5x10-5. According to the selection rules of the s-pz intraband transition in GaN/AlN QDs, we attribute the photoinduced increase of the probe transmission to the partial saturation of the quantum dots by the pump laser, and we deduce a homogeneous linewidth of 15 meV at 5K. We find that the differential transmission signal scales like the square-root of the incident pump power, thus revealing the importance of electron-electron scattering in the population relaxation dynamics. As a matter of fact, we find that the population relaxation from the pz excited state is predominantly governed by Auger-type processes whereas optical phonon emission only plays a minor role, even if it may contribute to secondary processes during the carrier cascade to the fundamental s state via intermediate confined states.
Persistent spectral-hole-burning (PSHB) phenomena have been observed in many kinds of semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). Luminescence hole burning and charged excitons have been observed in CuCl QDs in NaCl crystals. The observed PSHB phenomena are explained by the ionization of QDs. The energy of photoionized QDs is changed from the original energy and their new energies depend on the spatial arrangement of trapped carriers. Quantum confinement of carriers and the resulting strong Coulomb interaction between confined carriers and trapped carriers cause the energy change. PSHB has been widely applied to site-selective spectroscopy of QDs. Size-dependent excited exciton quantum states in CuCl quantum cubes, size-dependent excited electron-hole quantum states in CdTe QDs and renormalization of longitudinal optical phonons confined in CuCl QDs have been revealed by studying sideband holes. This also allowed the measurement of accumulated photon echo, which clarified the very sharp homogeneous spectral linewidth of QDs under weak excitation conditions.
Abstract : Slow and fast light schemes are attractive for many applications including optical signal processing and RF phased array antennas. Semiconductor based schemes offer electrical control of velocity at very high bandwidths in an extremely compact device. Further they operate at room temperature and can be easily integrated into various optical systems. In this program, we used ultrafast nonlinearities in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) to achieve tunable time shifts at THz frequencies. In particular, we leveraged the spectral hole burning phenomena and demonstrated fast light in quantum well (QW) and quantum dot (QD) SOAs. The research included both theoretical and experimental efforts. Theoretical work was developed to understand and simulate experimental results and to optimize device designs. We introduced a novel pulse compression technique to reduce the pulse width to 100 fs to efficiently use ultra-fast nonlinearities in SOAs to achieve a large and cascadable delay. We implemented a novel chirped pulse scheme and obtained the largest advance-pulse-product of 10.7 with THz bandwidth. We demonstrated slow and fast light with GHz RF signal in QW/QD SOAs using coherent population oscillation and four-wave mixing. We also demonstrated cascaded SOAs in a loop to scale up the delay/advance.