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Semiconductors

Excitonic lattice control

Nature Photonics volume 3, pages 613–615 (2009)Cite this article

Customizing the refractive index of wells and barriers in a periodic array of quantum wells yields a way to control the reflectivity and dispersion of an excitonic lattice. The result is a new method for slowing or modulating light.

On page 662 of this issue1, a new tool is reported for manipulating the propagation of light through such a structure by introducing an additional periodicity that interacts with the excitonic lattice. So far, studies have only involved periodic quantum wells (PQWs) that have almost identical refractive indices for their QWs and barriers (Fig. 1b). In the study of Goldberg et al., however, the refractive indices of the QW and barrier are different, resulting in a non-resonant photonic crystal (Fig. 1c). This one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystal has a stopband — a frequency band that does not allow signals to pass through — at some other wavelength, which can be seen as a peak in reflectivity, and this occurs even if the PQW spacing differs from half the exciton wavelength. When the QW spacing is adjusted so that the stopband is close to the exciton wavelength, the Bloch modes of the photonic crystal band edge interact with the excitonic lattice, giving reflectivity modulations that are stronger than those achieved without the underlying photonic crystal. This interaction can be exploited as a tool for altering the reflectivity of the structure, and therefore as a means of controlling the flow of photons.

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Figure 1: Excitonic lattice with and without an underlying 1D photonic crystal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hyatt M. Gibbs and Galina Khitrova are at the College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.,

    Hyatt M. Gibbs & Galina Khitrova

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  1. Hyatt M. Gibbs
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  2. Galina Khitrova
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Correspondence to Hyatt M. Gibbs.

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Gibbs, H., Khitrova, G. Excitonic lattice control. Nature Photon 3, 613–615 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2009.200

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2009.200

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