Nonlinear optical and electro-optical characteristics of hybrid AlAs/GaAs multilayered structures

In this paper, experimental results on giant electro-optical nonlinearities in a periodic multilayered structure are presented. The device consists of undoped GaAs and AlAs layers with nominal thicknesses of 58 nm and 69 nm, respectively. In summary, it is shown that hybrid multilayered semiconductor structures exhibit clear electro-optical modulation and giant optical nonlinearities leading to optical bistabilities at extremely low optical intensities. Thus, such devices offer potential applications for parallel signal processing.