Effect of applied electric field on the nonlinear optical properties of modulation-doped GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs double quantum well

Abstract

In the present study, the effects of varying doping concentration and applied electric field on the intersubband-related optical absorption and relative refractive index change coefficients in modulation-doped GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs double quantum wells are theoretically investigated. The allowed energy levels and the corresponding wave-functions are calculated by solving the Schrödinger and Poisson equations self-consistently within the framework of the effective-mass and parabolic band approximations. The optical coefficients are evaluated using the compact density matrix formalism within an iterative procedure. The numerical results are presented for two different doping concentration and several values of the electric field. They show that both the peak position and the magnitude of the calculated total optical absorption coefficients and refractive index changes are significantly affected by the applied electric field and the doping concentration. The treatment is suitable to consider the general problem with different wells and barrier sizes, although the barrier width should preferably be small enough as to allow for an effective inter-well coupling.