Far-infrared saturation spectroscopy of a single square well

We have performed saturation spectroscopy measurements of the lowest intersubband transition in a single 400 AA GaAs/Al0.3Ga0.7As modulation-doped square quantum well. We couple intense tunable far-infrared radiation from the Santa Barbara free electron laser into our sample using an edge-coupling technique and measure absorption as a function of frequency and intensity. Saturation and frequency shifts in the absorption line are clearly observed. We attribute the frequency shifts to reductions in the many-body depolarization shift. From our preliminary measurements, we estimate the intersubband relaxation time to be 600 ps to within a factor of three.