A. Tackeuchi et al., PICOSECOND OPTICAL SIGNAL RECOVERY IN TUNNELING BI-QUANTUM WELL STRUCTURE, Fujitsu Scientific and Technical Journal, 30(2), 1994, pp. 188-194
Fast recovery from the excitonic absorption bleaching in tunneling bi-
quantum well (TBQ) structures is proposed and demonstrated. The TBQ ha
s a new feature that conventional superlattices will never have; that
is, control of the recovery time of optical nonlinearity using tunneli
ng. By reducing the tunneling barrier thickness, the recovery time can
be reduced to the picosecond region, which is three orders of magnitu
de faster than the nanosecond recovery of conventional MQWs. By using
type-II TBQs, we have demonstrated all-optical gate operation of a Fab
ry-Perot etalon. The type-II TBQ etalon with 1.7-nm barriers exhibits
a full signal recovery of 17 ps.