İbrahim Karabulut

Excitonic effects on the nonlinear optical properties of small quantum dots

The excitonic effects on the nonlinear optical properties of small quantum dots with a semiparabolic confining potential are studied under the density matrix formalism. First, within the framework of the strong confinement approximation, we present the excitonic states and then calculate the excitonic effects on the nonlinear optical properties, such as second harmonic generation, third harmonic generation, nonlinear absorption coefficient and refractive index changes. We find the explicit analytical expressions between the corresponding nonlinear optical properties with and without considering the excitonic effects. It is seen that these analytical expressions are related only to ratios of the effective masses of electron and hole. These explicit expressions indicate that the excitonic effects on the corresponding nonlinear optical properties become more important with increasing orders of the optical susceptibilities. In addition, we suggest a scaling rule for the nth-order susceptibility as γ(n+1)/2. The effect of the confining potential frequency on the corresponding nonlinear optical properties is also studied. Our results show a remarkable dependence of nonlinear optical properties on both the excitonic effects and the confining potential frequency.

Effect of Coulomb interaction on nonlinear (intensity-dependent) optical processes and intrinsic bistability in a quantum well under the electric and magnetic fields

The effect of the electrostatic Coulomb interaction on the line shape related to the intensity-dependent intersubband optical processes in a Si δ-doped quantum well is studied using the density matrix formalism. The electronic structure of the quantum well is calculated from the self-consistent numerical solution of the coupled Schrodinger–Poisson equations. The line shape function is considerably modified by the optical intensity and the electric and magnetic fields. Moreover, we demonstrate the existence of the optical bistability for appropriate values of the optical intensity and also the control of the optical bistability with the electric and magnetic fields. It is also found that the intersubband relaxation time plays an important role in determining the optical bistability region.

Intersubband resonant enhancement of the nonlinear optical properties in compositionally asymmetric and interdiffused quantum wells

We report the resonant enhancement of the second- and third-order optical nonlinearities in compositionally asymmetric quantum wells with finite confining potential and interdiffused quantum wells. The energy levels and the envelope wave functions in quantum wells are obtained by solving numerically the Schrodinger equation. The optical rectification, second and third harmonic generation coefficients are calculated within the framework of the density matrix formalism. The effect of the structure parameters such as the well width and the barrier height on the nonlinear optical properties is investigated in detail. The resulting nonlinear susceptibilities obtained in both quantum wells are considerably larger than those of bulk GaAs.