Excitation of relaxation oscillations in a semiconductor superlattice by incident waves: efficient terahertz harmonics generation

Abstract

Generation of terahertz harmonics by frequency multiplication with a semiconductor superlattice due to an excitation of relaxation oscillations by incident waves is investigated theoretically. It is shown that the relaxation oscillations excitation becomes feasible if the superlattice dc resistance is low enough in comparison with a characteristic radiation impedance of the external waveguide system. The power of the generated harmonics as a function of the incident wave power demonstrates a threshold-like behavior at a specific input power level dependent on the superlattice peak current. We demonstrate that for typical superlattice parameters the roll-of frequency of the generated harmonics is mostly specified by the plasma frequency of electrons in a superlattice miniband. We argue that an increase of the superlattice miniband widths could essentially enhance both the efficiency and the spectral range of the generated terahertz harmonics.

18 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Semiconductor Superlattices: A model system for nonlinear transport
• Intersubband gain in a Bloch oscillator and Quantum cascade laser
• Terahertz Bloch oscillator with a modulated bias
• Bloch gain in dc-ac-driven semiconductor superlattices in the absence of electric domains
• Theory of parametric amplification in in superlattices
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Theory of spatially inhomogneous Bloch oscillations in semiconductor superlattices
• Spatially confined Bloch oscillations in semiconductor superlattices
• The non-linear terahertz response of hot electrons in low-dimensional semiconductor superlattices: Suppression of the polar-optical phonon scattering