Intersubband Transitions in Quantum Wells

This book contains the lectures delivered at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on the "Intersubband Transistions in Quantum Wells" held in Cargese, France, between the t 9 h and the 14th of September 1991. The urge for this Workshop was justified by the impressive growth of work dealing with this subject during the last two or three years. Indeed, thanks to recent progresses of epitaxial growth techniques, such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy, it is now possible to realize semiconductor layers ( e.g. GaAs) with thicknesses controlled within one atomic layer, sandwiched between insulating layers (e.g. AlGaAs). When the semiconducting layer is very thin, i.e. less than 15 nm, the energy of the carriers corresponding to their motion perpendicular to these layers is quantized, forming subbands of allowed energies. Because of the low effective masses in these semiconducting materials, the oscillator strengths corresponding to intersubband transitions are extremely large and quantum optical effects become giant in the 5 - 20 range: photoionization, optical nonlinearities, ... Moreover, a great theoretical surprise is that - thanks to the robustness of the effective mass theory - these quantum wells are a real life materialization of our old text book one-dimensional quantum well ideal. Complex physical phenomena may then be investigated on a simple model system.