Competition between electronic Kerr and free carrier effects in an ultimate-fast optically switched semiconductor microcavity

Abstract

We have performed ultrafast pump-probe experiments on a GaAs-AlAs microcavity with a resonance near 1300 nm in the "original" telecom band. We concentrate on ultimate-fast optical switching of the cavity resonance that is measured as a function of pump-pulse energy. We observe that at low pump-pulse energies the switching of the cavity resonance is governed by the instantaneous electronic Kerr effect and is achieved within 300 fs. At high pump-pulse energies the index change induced by free carriers generated in the GaAs start to compete with the electronic Kerr effect and reduce the resonance frequency shift. We have developed an analytic model which predicts this competition in agreement with the experimental data. Our model includes a new term in the intensity-dependent refractive index that considers the effect of the probe pulse intensity, which is resonantly enhanced by the cavity. We calculate the effect of the resonantly enhanced probe light on the refractive index change induced by the electronic Kerr effect for cavities with different quality factors. By exploiting the linear regime where only the electronic Kerr effect is observed, we manage to retrieve the nondegenerate third order nonlinear susceptibility for GaAs from the cavity resonance shift as a function of pump-pulse energy.

31 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Dynamic release of trapped light from an ultrahigh-Q nanocavity via adiabatic frequency tuning
• Dynamical ultrafast all-optical switching of planar GaAs/AlAs photonic microcavities
• Optical characterization and selective addressing of the resonant modes of a micropillar cavity with a white light beam
• Identification of competing ultrafast all-optical switching mechanisms in Si woodpile photonic crystals
• Kerr and free-carrier ultrafast all-optical switching of GaAs/AlAs nanostructures near the three-photon edge of GaAs

Cited by in corpus (8)

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• Programmable multiport optical circuits in opaque scattering materials
• Photonic switching devices based on semiconductor nanostructures
• All-optical Switching of a Microcavity Repeated at Terahertz Rates
• Crossover from exciton-polariton condensation to photon lasing in an optical trap
• Optimal all-optical switching of a microcavity resonance in the telecom range using the electronic Kerr effect
• Observation of gain-pinned dissipative solitons in a microcavity laser
• Observation of nonlinear bands in near-field scanning optical microscopy of a photonic-crystal waveguide