Abstract

We report early experimental results demonstrating a novel all-optical piezoelectric-barrier quantum well (QW) modulator. The device is designed such that an incident control laser beam strongly modulates the ground slate QW resonance of the heterostructure. Essential to this design is the fact that in strained semiconductor heterostructures grown along a polar axis (in our case [211]), the lattice-mismatch induced strain generates a large piezoelectric field along the growth axis [1].

© 1996 IEEE