Quantum well nonlinear microcavities

Abstract

We report on recent progress in reducing the power threshold of all-optical bistable quantum well vertical microcavities. Significant improvements are achieved through an increase of the cavity finesse, together with a reduction of the device active layer thickness. A critical intensity of 5 μW/μm 2 has been observed on a microcavity of finesse 250, with a nonlinear medium of only 18 GaAs quantum wells of 10 nm thickness. Further improvements of the Bragg mirror quality resulted in a finesse of 700 and a power-lifetime product of 15 fJ/μm 2. Microresonator pixellation allows to obtain 2-dimensional arrays. A thermally-induced alloy-mixing technique is described, which produced a 110 meV carrier confinement energy, together with a refractive index change of −.012, averaged over the 2.6 μm nonlinear medium thickness. The resulting electrical and optical confinement is shown to improve the nonlinear characteristics, by limiting lateral carrier diffusion and light diffraction.