Magnetospatial dispersion of semiconductor quantum wells

International audience; Polarization conversion of light reflected from quantum wells governed by both magnetic field and light propagation direction is observed. We demonstrate that the polarization conversion is caused by the magneto-spatial dispersion in quantum wells which manifests itself in the reflection coefficient contribution bilinear in the in-plane components of the magnetic field and the light wavevector. The magneto-spatial dispersion is shown to arise due to structure inversion asymmetry of the quantum wells. The effect is resonantly enhanced in the vicinity of the heavy-hole exciton. We show that microscopically the magneto-spatial dispersion is caused by the mixing of heavy-and light-hole states in the quantum well due to both orbital effect of the magnetic field and the in-plane hole motion. The degree of the structure inversion asymmetry is determined for GaAs/AlGaAs and CdTe quantum wells.