Slow terahertz light via resonant tunneling induced transparency in quantum well heterostructures

Abstract

We present a theoretical and computational investigation of the possibility of achieving slow terahertz light by exploiting the tunneling induced transparency (TIT) effect in suitably engineered quantum well heterostructure devices. We design such a meta-material and show how TIT could lead to large values of the group refractive index, unfortunately at the cost of strong field attenuation due to decoherence. As a suitable alternative, we propose a grating, consisting of a buffer and a quantum cascade amplifier regions, arranged in such a way as to achieve slow light and simultaneously compensate for the large signal losses. Our calculations show that a binary message could be reliably transmitted through this system, with non-critical reduction of the signal to noise ratio, as we achieve a slow-down factor of more than 70.