Unified description of saturation and bistability of intersubband transitions in the weak and strong light-matter coupling regimes

Abstract

We propose a unified description of intersubband absorption saturation for quantum wells inserted in a resonator, both in the weak and strong light-matter coupling regimes. We demonstrate how absorption saturation can be engineered. In particular we show that the saturation intensity increases linearly with the doping in the strong coupling regime, while it remains doping independent in weak coupling. Hence, countering intuition, the most suitable region to exploit low saturation intensities is not the ultra-strong coupling regime, but is instead at the onset of the strong light-matter coupling. We further derive explicit conditions for the emergence of bistability. This work sets the path towards yet unexisting ultrafast mid-infrared semiconductor saturable absorption mirrors (SESAMs) and bistable systems. As an example, we show how to design a mid-infrared SESAM with a three orders of magnitude reduction in saturation intensity, down to about 5 kW/cm2.

References in corpus (14)

• Quantum vacuum properties of the intersubband cavity polariton field
• Ultrastrong coupling of the cyclotron transition of a two-dimensional electron gas to a THz metamaterial
• Ultra-Strong Light-Matter Coupling Regime with Polariton Dots
• Polaritonic Bistability in Semiconductor Microcavities
• Charge induced coherence between intersubband plasmons in a quantum structure
• Stimulated scattering and lasing of intersubband cavity polaritons
• Ultra-fast amplitude modulation of mid-IR free-space beams at room-temperature
• Sub-cycle time resolution of multi-photon momentum transfer in strong-field ionization
• Ultra-Strong Light-Matter Coupling in Deeply Subwavelength THz LC resonators
• Excitons bound by photon exchange
• Optical phonon scattering of cavity polaritons in an electroluminescent device
• Resonant intersubband polariton-LO phonon scattering in an optically pumped polaritonic device
• Saturation and bistability of defect-mode intersubband polaritons
• Resonant Tunneling Diodes Strongly Coupled to the Cavity Field

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Low intensity saturation of an ISB transition by a mid-IR quantum cascade laser
• Theory of coherent optical nonlinearities of intersubband transitions in semiconductor quantum wells
• Direct polariton-to-electron tunneling in quantum cascade detectors operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime