Two-photon absorption photocurrent enhancement in bulk AlGaAs semiconductor microcavities

Abstract

We report on two-photon absorption (TPA) photocurrent in semiconductor microcavities. We experimentally show a substantial increase in the TPA photocurrent generated, at resonance, in a GaAlAs/GaAs microcavity designed for TPA operation at ∼890 nm. An enhancement factor of ∼12 000 of the photocurrent is obtained via the microcavity effect, which could have an important impact on the use of TPA devices for high speed switching and sampling applications. Our results also show the implications of the cavity photon lifetime on autocorrelation traces measured using TPA in semiconductor microcavities.