Photothermal deflection spectroscopy as a method for studying quantum-well heterostructures

Abstract Photothermal deflection spectroscopy (PDS) is introduced to measure the heat generated by optical absorption in quantum-well heterostructures at room temperature. The paper addresses various aspects of PDS applied to an epitaxial heterostructure on a transparent crystalline substrate. As an example we consider the case of a single 150 A wide quantum well (QW) of InGaAs in InP. We measure the PDS response over the entire spectral range from the fundamental QW absorption to the InP band edge.