Interplay of Coulomb and nonparabolicity effects in the intersubband absorption of electrons and holes in quantum wells

Published in:
Physical Review B 70, 205331-205338 (2004).
© 2004 The American Physical Society. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the American Physical Society.

Abstract:
Quantum well intersubband absorption with contributions from both valence and conduction subbands is computed with a nonequilibrium Keldysh Green’s function formalism, assuming an optical pump and probe scheme in undoped samples. The coupling between conduction and valence bands leads to contributions to the TE mode from the electrons, which are enhanced due to Coulomb corrections and may be resolved even in the presence of the dominating hole contributions. A strong contrast in the evolution of absorption spectra with increasing carrier density is predicted between TM and TE polarizations. The influence of strongly k-dependent dipole moments in combination with many-body effects is analyzed for intersubband transitions, including the evolution of the spectra with increasing excitation power. For the TE case, extra features appear in the spectra, due to interplays between bandstructure and Coulomb effects which are not present in the TM mode. The spectral evolution on both polarizations, broadening, number, and relative strength of the resolved peaks are in strong contrast with free-carrier results. Numerical results are given for four different structures.

Full version in pdf-format.