Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2022) 137: 903
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-03106-7

Regular Article

Giant Kerr–quintic–septic nonlinearities in semiconductor quantum wells

¹ Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology Meghalaya, 793101, Ri-Bhoi, India
² Department of Physics, Sarala Birla University, 835103, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India

^b rohitmukherjee670@gmail.com

Received: 18 May 2022
Accepted: 25 July 2022
Published online: 8 August 2022

Abstract

The higher order nonlinearities are investigated in asymmetric semiconductor double quantum well nanostructures with nearly vanishing absorption by electromagnetically induced transparency technique. The existence of giant Kerr, quintic, as well as septic nonlinearities, are identified in the quantum well nanostructures, whose peak values of ${\chi }^{(3)}$, ${\chi }^{(5)}$, and ${\chi }^{(7)}$ are found to be $\sim {10}^{-13}{\text{m}}^2/{\text{V}}^2$, $\sim {10}^{-25}{\text{m}}^4/{\text{V}}^4$ and $\sim {10}^{-37}{\text{m}}^6/{\text{V}}^6$, respectively, at 9.93 µm pumping wavelength. We demonstrate that not only the magnitude of Rabi frequencies or the detuning of the controlling fields, but also the relative phase of the applied fields can enhance these nonlinearities, and shift their peak values to any desired probe frequency. The giant higher-order nonlinearities identified in these quantum well nanostructures cannot be overlooked since the trait of a number of nonlinear optical phenomena critically relies on the nature and magnitude of these nonlinearities.