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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Room Temperature Excitonic Optical Bistability in GaAs Etalons

H. M. Gibbs, S. S. Tamg, Jack L. Jewell, Doreen A. Weinberger, Kuochou Tai, Arthur C. Gossard, S. L. McCall, A. Passner, W. Wiegmann

Published Jan 1, 1982• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical bistable devices may someday be the key elements of all-optical logic and computing systems.1 Semiconductor devices appear particularly promising because of very large optical nonlinearities permitting the construction of very small devices. The goal is to develop small (≃ 1 μm), fast (≃ 1 ps), low-power (≃ 1 μW), high-temperature (≃ 300 K) devices. Herein is reported room-temperature operation of GaAs devices that are similar in size, speed, and power to the low-temperature pure-GaAs device.2

DOI
10.1364/cleo.1982.fl6

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Optical bistable devices may someday be the key elements of all-optical logic and computing systems.1 Semiconductor devices appear particularly promising because of very large optical nonlinearities permitting the construction of very small devices. The goal is to develop small (≃ 1 μm), fast (≃ 1 ps), low-power (≃ 1 μW), high-temperature (≃ 300 K) devices. Herein is reported room-temperature operation of GaAs devices that are similar in size, speed, and power to the low-temperature pure-GaAs device.2
Optical signal processing using all-optical circuitry is an increasingly attractive goal with the recent progress in long- lived light sources, high quantum efficiency detectors, and low- loss high-bandwidth optical fibers. Devices which permit one light beam to control another or which provide an optical memory afford a capability essential to the success of all-optical logic systems. Much progress has been made toward practical bistable1 devices since the first observation2 of optical bistability in sodium vapor. (By optical bistability we refer to devices containing no inverted medium, so that bistable lasers3 are explicitly excluded.) The most practical device so far, a semiconductor etalon consisting of 4 μm of GaAs between 0.2 μm of Al0.42Ga0.53As with R = 0.9 coatings, is described herein.
Optical bistable devices containing GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum well (MQW) structures have shown great potential for performing fast low-power optical switching at room temperature.1 The presence of a much stronger exciton absorption feature in the MQW structures compared to bulk GaAs suggests far superior performance in the former. We report the observation of room-temperature bistability in bulk GaAs with input power <10 mW and intensities of a few kW/cm2. The intensities are consistent with the data of Miller et al.2 which show a saturation intensity of nearly 4 kW/cm2 in a MQW sample with a detuning of less than a halfwidth from the peak of the exciton resonance. Our detunings are always several halfwidths.
Intrinsic optical bistable devices have the potential for very fast all-optical logic.1 Achievement of high speeds necessitates short devices. Semiconductors are attractive materials for providing the essential optical nonlinearity because they can have absorption coefficients of order (μm)-1, ensuring strong interactions in short lengths. Furthermore, they have relatively sharp absorption features, e.g., an exciton, biexciton, or band-edge resonance, which permits very large nonlinear phase shifts via near-resonance enhancement but with low absorption by off-resonance operation.
Epitaxial methods allow the fabrication of nonlinear interferometric structures which include the mirrors and the nonlinear medium in a single crystal. Optical bistability is observed in these structures at mW optical power. The large excitonic and band-gap resonant nonlinearities of direct-gap semiconductors, such as bulk GaAs or Multiple Quantum Wells (MQW), allow to reach a substantial phase-shift (0.2-0.3 radian) over interaction lengths as small as a few wavelengths. This results in very compact nonlinear microcavities, with typically 5μm overall thickness.