Objective
The purpose of this project is to capitalise on the huge second order optical nonlinearities in semiconductor heterostructures to perform optical frequency conversion in optical wave guides. We propose to realise two demonstrators: a blue/UV coherent source obtained from the frequency doubling of a tunable GaAs/AlGaAs laser in a very large gap ZnMgSSe/ ZnSSe heterostructure, and a tunable room temperature mid-infrared (8-12 um) source by frequency difference in a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure also pumped by tunable GaAs based lasers. Both structures are tunable and are potentially monolithically integrable (the wave guide and the source). Both devices will have major impacts on information technologies, the tunable blue/UV sources allowing high density optical storage and the mid-infrared source being of primordial importance for automated industrial process control and pollution monitoring. Moreover, this approach has a very general scope and could be applied to other regions of the optical spectrum, for optical demultiplexing or switching, etc.
The timeliness, originality and relevance of this programme are briefly summarised as follows:
- Semiconductor optical nonlinearities are huge though mostly not taken into consideration because of the lack of natural birefringence.
- Semiconductor technologies are mature for the III-V materials and experience a recent drastic improvement for the II-VI.
- Very complex structures may be grown by techniques like Molecular Beam Epitaxy so that new phase-matching scenarios may be explored.
These techniques also allow control of thicknesses on the atomic scale, which will have profound influence on the conversion yield and which is a unique feature of semiconductor wave guides.
- High power, cheap and monolithically integrable semiconductor sources are now available as pump sources.
- The semiconductor heterostructure growth quality is far less stringent for optical properties than for transport properties, which is particularly important for II-VI compounds which are somewhat dislocated and practically impossible to dope for very large gaps (in the UV).
The first part of the project will consist of exploring new concepts of phase-matching in semiconductor heterostructures and demonstrating them on test samples.
The main directions of research are:
- Shape birefringence in multistack heterostructures for phase-matching between TE and TM pumping waves.
- Modal birefringence in asymmetric heterostructures for optimisation of optical overlap between modes.
- Quantum birefringence in strained quantized heterostructures due to different symmetries in heavy and light hole wave functions
- Bloch wave phase matching in optical microcavities .
The second part of the project will mainly consist of focusing on the most promising tracks and in realising usable demonstration sources.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences environmental sciences pollution
- natural sciences physical sciences electromagnetism and electronics semiconductivity
- natural sciences physical sciences optics laser physics
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Coordinator
75 008 Paris
France
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