Raab, J, Mezzapesa, FP, Viti, L et al. (8 more authors) (2020) Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons. Nature Communications, 11. 4290. ISSN 2041-1723
Abstract
Semiconductor heterostructures have enabled a great variety of applications ranging from GHz electronics to photonic quantum devices. While nonlinearities play a central role for cutting-edge functionality, they require strong field amplitudes owing to the weak light-matter coupling of electronic resonances of naturally occurring materials. Here, we ultrastrongly couple intersubband transitions of semiconductor quantum wells to the photonic mode of a metallic cavity in order to custom-tailor the population and polarization dynamics of intersubband cavity polaritons in the saturation regime. Two-dimensional THz spectroscopy reveals strong subcycle nonlinearities including six-wave mixing and a collapse of light-matter coupling within 900 fs. This collapse bleaches the absorption, at a peak intensity one order of magnitude lower than previous all-integrated approaches and well achievable by state-of-the-art QCLs, as demonstrated by a saturation of the structure under cw-excitation. We complement our data by a quantitative theory. Our results highlight a path towards passively mode-locked QCLs based on polaritonic saturable absorbers in a monolithic single-chip design.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. |
Keywords: | Electronics, photonics and device physics; Polaritons; Quantum cascade lasers; Terahertz optics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Electronic & Electrical Engineering (Leeds) > Pollard Institute (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 665158 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 02 Sep 2020 14:58 |
Last Modified: | 02 Sep 2020 14:58 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41467-020-18004-8 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:165016 |
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