Simple electrical biasing for minimizing the nonlinearities of quantum-well Mach-Zehnder modulators.

The quadratic nature of the electro-optic effect in semiconductor Mach-Zehnder modulators based on the quantum-confined Stark effect allows simple electrical biasing to eliminate either the second-order or the third-order distortions in the optical output, improving the device linearity for single-octave bandwidth multicarrier analog modulation applications.