Abstract

The effectiveness of surface recombination in speeding up the recovery time of windowless GaAs nonlinear etalons is reported. Recently, it was demonstrated that bulk GaAs with no top AIGaAs layer (windowless) showed fast recovery in a nonlinear optical gating experiment.¹ To understand better the physical mechanisms and practical limitations on the speed of windowless GaAs nonlinear optical gates, samples of various thickness are needed. Bulk GaAs samples of different thickness (1.5, 0.5, 0.30, 0.135 μm) having no AIGaAs windows were prepared by the molecular-beam-epitaxial-growth technique, and nonlinear Fabry-Perot etalons were fabricated using these GaAs crystals as nonlinear media sandwiched between identical dielectric mirrors.

© 1986 Optical Society of America