Browsing by Author "McGill, Stephen A."

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    Fermi-edge superfluorescence from a quantum-degenerate electron-hole gas
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2013) Kim, Ji-Hee; Noe, G. Timothy II; McGill, Stephen A.; Wang, Yongrui; Wojcik, Aleksander K.; Belyanin, Alexey A.; Kono, Junichiro
    Nonequilibrium can be a source of order. This rather counterintuitive statement has been proven to be true through a variety of fluctuation-driven, self-organization behaviors exhibited by out-of-equilibrium, many-body systems in nature (physical, chemical, and biological), resulting in the spontaneous appearance of macroscopic coherence. Here, we report on the observation of spontaneous bursts of coherent radiation from a quantum-degenerate gas of nonequilibrium electron-hole pairs in semiconductor quantum wells. Unlike typical spontaneous emission from semiconductors, which occurs at the band edge, the observed emission occurs at the quasi-Fermi edge of the carrier distribution. As the carriers are consumed by recombination, the quasi-Fermi energy goes down toward the band edge, and we observe a continuously red-shifting streak. We interpret this emission as cooperative spontaneous recombination of electron-hole pairs, or superfluorescence (SF), which is enhanced by Coulomb interactions near the Fermi edge. This novel many-body enhancement allows the magnitude of the spontaneously developed macroscopic polarization to exceed the maximum value for ordinary SF, making electron-hole SF even more ﾑﾑsuperﾒﾒ than atomic SF.
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    Superfluorescence from photoexcited semiconductor quantum wells: Magnetic field, temperature, and excitation power dependence
    (American Physical Society, 2015) Cong, Kankan; Wang, Yongrui; Kim, Ji-Hee; Noe, G. Timothy II; McGill, Stephen A.; Belyanin, Alexey; Kono, Junichiro
    Superfluorescence (SF) is a many-body process in which a macroscopic polarization spontaneously builds up from an initially incoherent ensemble of excited dipoles and then cooperatively decays, producing a delayed pulse of coherent radiation. SF arising from electron-hole recombination has recently been observed in In0.2Ga0.8As/GaAs quantum wells [G. T. Noe et al., Nature Phys. 8, 219 (2012) and J.-H. Kim et al., Sci. Rep. 3, 3283 (2013)], but its observability conditions have not been fully established. Here, by performing magnetic field (B), temperature (T), and pump power (P) dependent studies of SF intensity, linewidth, and delay time through time-integrated and time-resolved magnetophotoluminescence spectroscopy, we have mapped out the B−T−P region in which SF is observable. In general, SF can be observed only at sufficiently low temperatures, sufficiently high magnetic fields, and sufficiently high laser powers with characteristic threshold behavior. We provide theoretical insights into these behaviors based primarily on considerations on how the growth rate of macroscopic coherence depends on these parameters. These results provide fundamental new insight into electron-hole SF, highlighting the importance of Coulomb interactions among photogenerated carriers as well as various scattering processes that are absent in SF phenomena in atomic and molecular systems.