Tunable optical delay via carrier induced exciton dephasing in semiconductor quantum wells

We report the experimental realization of a tunable optical delay by exploiting unique incoherent nonlinear optical processes in semiconductors. The tunable optical delay takes advantage of the strong Coulomb interactions between excitons and free carriers and uses optical injection of free carriers to broaden and bleach an exciton absorption resonance. Fractional delay exceeding 200% has been obtained for an 8 ps optical pulse propagating near the heavy-hole excitonic transition in a GaAs quantum well structure. Tunable optical delay based on optical injection of free carriers avoids strong absorption of the pump beam and is also robust against variations in the frequency of the pump beam.