Optical properties of double quantum wires under the combined effect of spin-orbit interaction and in-plane magnetic field

•Quantum wire formed by a symmetric, double quartic-well potential is considered.•In-plane magnetic field and spin-orbit interactions are taken into account.•Optical absorption coefficients and refractive index changes are surveyed.•Remarkable modifications in the optical characteristics have been observed.

In this work, we investigate the intersubband optical absorption coefficients and refractive index changes for transitions between the lower-lying electronic levels of double quantum wires formed by a symmetric, double quartic-well potential. The system is subjected to an external in-plane magnetic field and Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings are taken into account. The analytical expressions of the linear and nonlinear absorption coefficients and refractive index changes are obtained by using the compact density-matrix approach and iterative method. The dependence of the optical characteristics on the magnetic field, spin-orbit interactions, quantum wire radius, structural parameter and photon energies has been examined. Numerical results exhibit that the optical properties are considerably sensitive to the strength and orientation of magnetic field as well as to the spin-orbit couplings and thus can be controlled by these parameters.