Picosecond Optoelectronic Switches

Picosecond optoelectronic switches are used to generate electrical pulses with picosecond duration from correspondingly short optical pulses. This is accomplished by fast photoconductors based on materials with short free carrier lifetime, like amorphous semiconductors or defect-rich crystalline materials. Picosecond switches are employed for both fundamental studies of transport in the respective material as well as for applications in high speed electronics and optoelectronics. We shall describe the operation principle of picosecond switches and report some of the recent applications including picosecond studies of transport mechanisms in implanted Si on sapphire and synchronous mode-locking of semiconductor lasers.