Polarization-dependent optical nonlinearities of multiquantum-well laser amplifiers studied by four-wave mixing
Abstract
We present a detailed study of the polarization properties of four-wave mixing in multiquantum-well (MQW) semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA's). In particular, the polarization selection rules relevant to all processes contributing to the generation of the four-wave mixing signal are rigorously derived and discussed. We then show the importance of these results in applications where four-wave mixing is used as a spectroscopic tool to study the optical nonlinearities of semiconductor gain media. For illustration, we demonstrate two novel applications of polarization-resolved four-wave mixing. The first is a new technique for measuring the recombination lifetime in SOA's, based on mixing of a pump wave with polarized amplified spontaneous emission noise. In the second, we use the same polarization selection rules to measure the interwell transport lifetime in alternating-strain MQW amplifiers. Finally, we also discuss the possibility of studying the dynamics of the optically induced phase coherence between spin-degenerate states.
Additional Information
© Copyright 1997 IEEE. Reprinted with permission. Manuscript received January 22, 1997; revised April 2, 1997. This work was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract DAAL 01-94-K-03430 and by the National Science Foundation under Grant ECS-9412862.Files
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- CaltechAUTHORS:PAIieeejstqe97
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2008-02-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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