Abstract

Large polarization rotations and ellipticity changes are photoinduced at room temperature in semiconductor microcavities containing manganese. Two contributions of different physical origins are identified thanks to a time resolved spectral analysis. A short lived contribution only occurs for circularly polarized pump beams, due to the polarization dependent saturation of the excitonic transition. A nanosecond duration pump-polarization independent contribution is also reported which is presumably due to a photoinduced magnetization mediated by free holes due to the trapping of electron on manganese ions. A simple model based on transfer matrices confirm the experimental results. These room temperature processes could be useful for fast high contrast optical signal processing.

© 2005 Optical Society of America