Coulomb-induced synchronization of intersubband coherences in highly doped quantum wells and the formation of giant collective resonances

Abstract

Many-body Coulomb interactions drastically modify the optical response of highly doped semiconductor quantum wells leading to a merger of all intersubband transition resonances into one sharp peak at the frequency substantially higher than all single-particle transition frequencies. Starting from standard density matrix equations for the gas of pairwise interacting fermions within Hartree-Fock approximation, we show that this effect is due to Coulomb-induced synchronization of the oscillations of coherences of all $N$ intersubband transitions and sharp collective increase in their coupling with an external optical field. In the high doping limit, the dynamics of light-matter interaction is described by the analytic theory of $N$ coupled oscillators which determines new collective normal modes of the system and predicts the frequency and strength of the blueshifted collective resonance.