PROBING TERAHERTZ ELECTRON DYNAMICS IN SEMICONDUCTOR NANOSTRUCTURES WITH THE UC SANTA-BARBARA FELS

The UCSB free electron lasers radiate quasi-cw tunable radiation from 120 GHz to 4.8 THz at the kilowatt power level. These lasers enable re searchers to probe high frequency nonlinear electron transport in stat e-of-the-art semiconductor nanostructures. The impact of this research could have important consequences in the fields of high frequency sem iconductor science and technology. Three experiments are described tha t demonstrate the application of FELs in exploring terahertz dynamics of semiconductor nanostructures: i) photon-assisted tunneling in a sem iconductor superlattice; ii) dynamical response of a resonant tunnelin g diode; and iii) saturation spectroscopy of a single square quantum w ell.