Abstract

We have been investigated optical properties of precisely size-controlled GaAs thin films, where exciton motion is quantized and non-local interaction between excitons and photons should be considered. We observed an enhanced third-order nonlinear optical response for a 110nm-thick GaAs film using degenerate four-wave mixing[1]. The observed nonlinear response was 25 times larger than that of a 1μm-thick film. This result agrees with a theoretical proposal of enhanced nonlinear optical responses of exciton-polaritons in a thin film with a particular thickness [2]. In this paper, we demonstrate, for the first time, optical switching using nonlinear optical responses of exciton-polaritons in a GaAs thin film.

© 2000 IEEE