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Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons
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 re...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7453201/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32855392 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18004-8 |
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author | Raab, Jürgen Mezzapesa, Francesco P. Viti, Leonardo Dessmann, Nils Diebel, Laura K. Li, Lianhe Davies, A. Giles Linfield, Edmund H. Lange, Christoph Huber, Rupert Vitiello, Miriam S. |
author_facet | Raab, Jürgen Mezzapesa, Francesco P. Viti, Leonardo Dessmann, Nils Diebel, Laura K. Li, Lianhe Davies, A. Giles Linfield, Edmund H. Lange, Christoph Huber, Rupert Vitiello, Miriam S. |
author_sort | Raab, Jürgen |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7453201 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-74532012020-09-04 Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons Raab, Jürgen Mezzapesa, Francesco P. Viti, Leonardo Dessmann, Nils Diebel, Laura K. Li, Lianhe Davies, A. Giles Linfield, Edmund H. Lange, Christoph Huber, Rupert Vitiello, Miriam S. Nat Commun Article 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. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-08-27 /pmc/articles/PMC7453201/ /pubmed/32855392 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18004-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Raab, Jürgen Mezzapesa, Francesco P. Viti, Leonardo Dessmann, Nils Diebel, Laura K. Li, Lianhe Davies, A. Giles Linfield, Edmund H. Lange, Christoph Huber, Rupert Vitiello, Miriam S. Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
title | Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
title_full | Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
title_fullStr | Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
title_full_unstemmed | Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
title_short | Ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
title_sort | ultrafast terahertz saturable absorbers using tailored intersubband polaritons |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7453201/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32855392 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18004-8 |
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