Four-wave mixing mediated by the capture of electrons and holes in semiconductor quantum-well laser amplifiers

Applied Physics Letters

Volumn 71, Issue 25, 1997, Pages 3601-3603

  Paiella, Roberto ^a   Hunziker, Guido ^a   Vahala, Kerry J ^a   Koren, Uzi ^b  

^a California Institute of Technology   (United States)

^b LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AMPLIFIERS (ELECTRONIC); CARRIER CONCENTRATION; ELECTRONIC DENSITY OF STATES; FOUR WAVE MIXING; FREQUENCY DOMAIN ANALYSIS; PHASE MODULATION; PHONONS; QUANTUM WELL LASERS;

FREQUENCY RESOLVED FOUR WAVE MIXING; INTRINSIC CAPTURE LIFETIME; OPTICAL AMPLIFIERS; PHASE MATCHING;

SEMICONDUCTOR QUANTUM WELLS;

EID: 0031362247     PISSN: 00036951     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1063/1.120453     Document Type: Article

References (15)

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14. The photon energy of the pump waves was 0.94 eV, which is smaller than the barrier band gap by an amount on the order of the thermal energy kT. Accounting for thermal broadening, we conclude that the electronic states directly modulated by these waves are not bound in any quantum well (i.e., they are purely 3D states), although their wavefunctions are somewhat localized near the wells. As a result, capture from these states is probably faster than capture from more plane-wave-like states that are higher in energy. The study of the dependence of the capture rate on the excitation energy will be the subject of a future work.
15. In cases where carrier diffusion cannot be neglected, an analysis based on the model of interwell carrier dynamics described in Ref. 12 shows that Eq. (2) remains valid with the intrinsic capture rate rescaled by a geometrical factor (approximately the ratio of the quantum-wells volume to the barriers volume, which in the present structure is close to unity anyway). This is consistent with the results of Refs. 5 and 6.