Kerr and free-carrier ultrafast all-optical switching of GaAs/AlAs nanostructures near the three-photon edge of GaAs

Abstract

We performed non-degenerate pump-probe experiments on a GaAs/AlAs photonic structure. We switched the photonic properties using the optical Kerr effect and free carriers excited by three photon absorption. From these measurements we extracted the non-degenerate Kerr coefficients over a broad wavelength range and we extracted the three photon absorption coefficient for GaAs at three wavelengths in the near infrared. We show that the optical Kerr effect is large enough to switch a cavity resonance with a high \emph{Q} ($Q>1000$) photonic cavity.

18 pages, 8 figures pdf format

References in corpus (4)

• Spatial homogeneity of optically switched semiconductor photonic crystals and of bulk semiconductors
• Dynamical ultrafast all-optical switching of planar GaAs/AlAs photonic microcavities
• All-optical octave-broad ultrafast switching of Si woodpile photonic band gap crystals
• Ultrafast optical switching of three-dimensional Si inverse opal photonic band gap crystals

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Identification of competing ultrafast all-optical switching mechanisms in Si woodpile photonic crystals