Feature

Optical nonlinearities with an alternate growth technique

A. Kost, M. Kawase, and E. Garmire

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in developing low power, high speed optical signal processing elements from semiconductor materials. These devices use an intensity dependent absorption or an intensity dependent index of refraction to modulate light. Bulk semiconductors have large optical nonlinearities, especially when exposed to light that is resonant with the band-gap. Two types of semiconductor materials that exhibit even larger nonlinearites are multiple quantum wells (MQWs) and doping superlattices (DS).

Publish Date: 01 December 1987