Semiconductor quantum templates: bottom-up design of optical devices and photonic circuits using sub-nanoscale high...

We propose an alternative bottom-up technique for designing, fabricating and monolithically integrating optical components, including functional distributed feedback lasers, modulators, waveguides, etc in a single semiconductor wafer without any need for etching or post-processing epitaxial growth. The proposed technique is based on the formation of semiconductor quantum templates at the well/barrier interfaces of quantum well structures. Such templates are responsible for changing the thickness of a quantum well in designated regions by adding one extra monolayer of the well material in those regions during the growth process. We show that, using a control laser field, these templates or sub-nanoscale high monolayer features allow us to spatially control the formation of electromagnetically induced transparency, gain without inversion, and coherent enhancement/suppression of the refractive index along the plane of the quantum well. We demonstrate that this can lead to bottom-up design capabilities for functional optical devices and their monolithic integration using a single epitaxial growth process.