Microcavity effect on the nonlinear optical intersubband absorption in semiconductor quantum wells

Abstract

Based on a semi-classical local-field formalism in which retardation effect in connection with the electromagnetic propagation and nonlocal effect in the optical response of confined electron systems are included, we calculated the nonlinear optical intersubband absorption coefficient of a quantum well (QW) inside a microcavity. We show that, in the case where the cavity resonance energy is close to the intersubband resonance energy of the QW, an inclusion of the cavity effect results in a significant enhancement of the optical intersubband nonlinearities of the QW system in the vicinity of the cavity resonance frequency. As a consequence, the saturation intensity of the QW structure is substantially lowered compared with the results in the absence of the microcavity effect. The cavity effect on the nonlinear absorption lineshape of the QW is also discussed.