Low saturation fluence in a semiconductor saturable electroabsorber mirror operated in a self-biased regime

A semiconductor saturable absorber mirror utilizing the electroabsorption effect on a self-biased stack of extremely shallow quantum wells is proposed and analyzed theoretically and numerically. The saturation flux and recovery time of the proposed device when operated with picosecond incident pulses are shown to compare very favorably with existing all-optical constructions. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics.