Semiconductor Microstructure in a Squeezed Vacuum: Electron-Hole Plasma Luminescence

In this work we investigate a low dimensional semiconductor system, in which the light-matter interaction is enhanced by the cooperative behavior of a large number of dipolar oscillators, at different frequencies, mutually phase locked by Coulomb interaction. We experimentally and theoretically demonstrate that, owing to this phenomenon, the optical response of a semiconductor quantum well with several occupied subbands is a single sharp resonance, associated to the excitatio...

The dramatic appearance of luminescence rings with radius of several hundred microns in quantum well structures can be understood through a fairly simple nonlinear model of the diffusion and recombination of electrons and holes in a driven nonequilibrium system. The ring corresponds to the boundary between a positive hole gas and a negative electron gas in steady state. While this basic effect is now well understood, we discuss several other experimental results which can not...

Time resolved photoluminescence is a powerful technique to study the collective dynamics of excitons and polaritons in semiconductor nanostructures. We present a two excitation pulses technique to induce the ultrafast and controlled quenching of the exciton emission in a quantum well. The depth of the dip is given by the magnitude of the warming of the carriers induced by the arrival of a laser pulse when an exciton population is already present in the sample. We use this tec...

When particles with integer spin accumulate at low temperature and high density they undergo Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). Atoms, solid-state excitons and excitons coupled to light all exhibit BEC, which results in high coherence due to massive occupation of the respective system's ground state. Surprisingly, photons were shown to exhibit BEC much more recently in organic dye-filled optical microcavities, which, owing to the photon's low mass, occurs at room temperature. ...

Quantum particles sometimes cooperate to develop a macroscopically ordered state with extraordinary properties. Superconductivity and Bose-Einstein condensation are examples of such cooperative phenomena where macroscopic order appears spontaneously. Here, we demonstrate that such an ordered state can also be obtained in an optically excited semiconductor quantum well in a high magnetic field. When we create a dense electron-hole plasma with an intense laser pulse, after a ce...

Hybrid opto, electro, and mechanical systems operating at several GHz offer extraordinary opportunities for the coherent control of opto-electronic excitations down to the quantum limit. We introduce here a monolithic platform for GHz semiconductor optomechanics based on electrically excited phonons guided along the spacer of a planar microcavity (MC) embedding quantum well (QW) emitters. The MC spacer bound by cleaved lateral facets acts as an embedded acoustic waveguide (WG...

We present a systematic theory of Coulomb-induced correlation effects in the nonlinear optical processes within the strong-coupling regime. In this paper we shall set a dynamics controlled truncation scheme \cite{Axt Stahl} microscopic treatment of nonlinear parametric processes in SMCs including the electromagnetic field quantization. It represents the starting point for the microscopic approach to quantum optics experiments in the strong coupling regime without any assumpti...

We calculate the transfer rate of correlations from polarization entangled photons to the collective spin of a many-electron state in a two-band system. It is shown that when a semiconductor absorbs pairs of photons from a two-mode squeezed vacuum, certain fourth order electron-photon processes correlate the spins of the excited electron pairs of different quasi-momenta. Different distributions of the quantum Stokes vector of the light lead to either enhancement or reduction ...

We show that inducing sidebands in the emission of a single emitter into a one dimensional waveguide, together with a dissipative re-pumping process, a photon field is cooled down to a squeezed vacuum. Our method does not require to be in the strong coupling regime, works with a continuum of propagating field modes and it may lead to sources of tunable multimode squeezed light in circuit QED systems.

We show that a quasi-two dimensional condensate of optically active excitons emits coherent light even in the absence of population inversion. This allows an unambiguous and clear experimental detection of the condensed phase. We prove that, due to the exciton-photon coupling, quantum and thermal fluctuations do not destroy condensation at finite temperature. Suitable conditions to achieve condensation are temperatures of a few K for typical exciton densities, and the use of ...