Theory of coherent optical nonlinearities of intersubband transitions in semiconductor quantum wells

Abstract

We theoretically study the coherent nonlinear response of electrons confined in semiconductor quantum wells under the effect of an electromagnetic radiation close to resonance with an intersubband transition. Our approach is based on the time-dependent Schrödinger-Poisson equation stemming from a Hartree description of Coulomb-interacting electrons. This equation is solved by standard numerical tools and the results are interpreted in terms of approximated analytical formulas. For growing intensity, we observe a redshift of the effective resonance frequency due to the reduction of the electric dipole moment and the corresponding suppression of the depolarization shift. The competition between coherent nonlinearities and incoherent saturation effects is discussed. The strength of the resulting optical nonlinearity is estimated across different frequency ranges from mid-IR to THz with an eye to ongoing experiments on Bose-Einstein condensation of intersubband polaritons and to the speculative exploration of quantum optical phenomena such as single-photon emission in the mid-IR and THz windows.

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• Quantum fluids of light
• Intersubband Polaritons in the Electrical Dipole Gauge
• Spontaneous coherence in spatially extended photonic systems: Non-Equilibrium Bose-Einstein condensation
• Ultra-Strong Light-Matter Coupling in Deeply Subwavelength THz LC resonators
• Intersubband polariton-polariton scattering in a dispersive microcavity
• Unified description of saturation and bistability of intersubband transitions in the weak and strong light-matter coupling regimes
• THz ultra-strong light-matter coupling up to 200K with continuously-graded parabolic quantum wells
• A generalized Gross-Pitaevskii model for intersubband polariton lasing

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Intersubband polariton-polariton scattering in a dispersive microcavity
• Nonperturbative cavity quantum electrodynamics: is the Jaynes-Cummings model still relevant?
• Low intensity saturation of an ISB transition by a mid-IR quantum cascade laser
• Ultrahigh free-electron Kerr nonlinearity in all-semiconductor waveguides for all-optical nonlinear modulation of mid-infrared light
• Light-matter interactions in the vacuum of ultra-strongly coupled systems