Eur. Phys. J. D (2015) 69: 134
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-50575-0

Regular Article

Control of the carrier-envelope-phase effect in the transmitted spectra in quantum wells via terahertz waves

¹ School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou 221116, P.R. China
² State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, P.R. China

^a e-mail: chaojinzhang@163.com
^b e-mail: chpliu@siom.ac.cn

Received: 2 August 2014
Received in final form: 10 April 2015
Published online: 21 May 2015

Abstract

The propagation of a short pulse through an ensemble of semiconductor double quantum wells is theoretically investigated, and that whether the transmitted spectrum is discrete or continuous strongly depends on the carrier envelope phase (CEP) of the incident light pulse. Its origin lies in the quantum interference effect among the different-number-photon absorption paths. As expected, such a CEP-dependence weakens with the increment of pulse duration, till disappears for an enough long pulse. However, if a weak terahertz wave is superposed to this long pulse, the transmitted spectrum recovers as CEP-dependent once more, which inversely can be used to characterize the phase property of the terahertz wave and provides supports for its widespread use.