Son et lumière : A combined engineering of photons and acoustic phonons in semiconductor nanostructures

Bernard Jusserand

Institut des Nanosciences de Paris, UPMC-CNRS

Jueves 7/3/2013, 14 hs
Aula Seminario, 2do piso, Pabellón I 

Semiconductor superlattices are periodic stacks of two different materials, such as GaAs and AlAs, well known for their novel electronic and photonic properties. In this talk, I will present the ideas which we developed in the past years, how to transfer the same ideas to the field of acoustic phonons in multilayers. I will recall the concepts of folded acoustic phonon in a periodic multilayer stack and of cavity phonons in a novel device: the acoustic nanocavity.

Using pump-probe and Raman scattering experiments, we have demonstrated that the acoustic nanodevices are very efficient generators and detectors of quasi-monochromatic acoustic wave packets up to frequencies around 1 THz and that their properties can be widely engineered by adjusting the devices parameters and the transduction wavelength. High resolution Raman scattering (10^-2 cm^-1) also allowed us to determine the lifetime of acoustic phonons confined in nanocavities.