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Topical Meeting on Optical Bistability (OB)

Strong Light-Semiconductor Interactions in CdS, GaSe and Optical Bistability

В.С. Днепровский, A. I. Furtichev, V. Klimov, Shen Li, E. V. Nazvanova, D. K. Okorokov, U. V. Vandishev

Published Jan 1, 1988• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Changes in absorption and refractive index caused by the absorption of laser light in CdS and GaSe ("dynamic” nonlinearities which may lead to optical bistability /OB/) were investigated. Nonlinear effects may be very strong ("giant" nonlinearities) due to the resonant enhancement near the sharp band edge in the case of resonant excitation of excitons or interband transition.

DOI
10.1364/obi.1988.fa.8

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Changes in absorption and refractive index caused by the absorption of laser light in CdS and GaSe ("dynamic” nonlinearities which may lead to optical bistability /OB/) were investigated. Nonlinear effects may be very strong ("giant" nonlinearities) due to the resonant enhancement near the sharp band edge in the case of resonant excitation of excitons or interband transition.
We report the observation of an intensity-dependent refractive-index nonlinearity in CdS due to a resonance state where an excitonic molecule is created by induced absorption of light. The refractive indexnas a function of the incident laser photon energyEis measured directly by light refraction in thin crystal prisms. A renormalized dielectric function describes the measuredn(E)spectra well. This strong refractive-index nonlinearity is well suited to produce an optical bistability and to further strengthen the evidence of CdS to be an important material for laser-induced dynamic gratings.
Nonlinear optical properties of laser-excited semiconductors are discussed, and the applications to optical bistability and optical logic are reviewed. The physical origin of the nonlinearities is analyzed in terms of the many-body interactions in the system of electron-hole pairs, causing effects such as plasma screening of the Coulomb interaction, band-gap renormalization, and band filling. Theoretical results for absorption and refractive-index spectra are compared to experimental data obtained for room-temperature GaAs and other semiconductors. The experimental and theoretical results for dispersive optical bistability in semiconductors are summarized, and recent experiments on optical logic gating and pattern recognition are discussed.
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.