Vacuum Rabi splitting enhances resonant optical nonlinearity in semiconductor quantum well microcavity exciton system

Abstract

Electromagnetic induced transparency (EIT) in condensed media, especially in a semiconductor, is attractive for nonlinear applications, because of its high density, compactness, and flexibility in artificial design. However, fast relaxation time and fermionic character of electrons obstructs the realization of EIT in semiconductor materials. We propose a resonant parametric conversion scheme which is applicable to the semiconductor quantum well (QW) microcavity (MC) exciton system. Because of its large oscillator strength, the semiconductor QW MC excitons show the large vacuum Rabi splitting which can be larger than the phase relaxation broadening of the media. It is found that when the coupling strength of the MC mode and the medium transition is larger than any other Rabi frequency and relaxation rate, the nonlinear susceptibility term becomes dominant compared to the linear susceptibility term.