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Physical Review Letters

Phase Evolution of Solitonlike Optical Pulses during Excitonic Rabi Flopping in a Semiconductor

Nils C. Nielsen, Tilman Höner zu Siederdissen, J. Kühl, Martin Schaarschmidt, Jens Förstner, A. Knorr, Harald W. Giessen

Published Feb 9, 2005• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate that the temporal pulse phase remains essentially unaltered before separate phase characteristics are developed when propagating high-intensity pulses coherently on the exciton resonance of an optically thick semiconductor. This behavior is a clear manifestation of self-induced transmission and pulse breakup into soliton-like pulses due to Rabi flopping of the carrier density. Experiments using a novel fast-scan cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating (XFROG) method are in good agreement with numerical calculations based on the semiconductor Bloch equations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.94.057406

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We demonstrate that the temporal pulse phase remains essentially unaltered before separate phase characteristics are developed when propagating high-intensity pulses coherently on the exciton resonance of an optically thick semiconductor. This behavior is a clear manifestation of self-induced transmission and pulse breakup into soliton-like pulses due to Rabi flopping of the carrier density. Experiments using a novel fast-scan cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating (XFROG) method are in good agreement with numerical calculations based on the semiconductor Bloch equations.
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We present phase-resolved pulse propagation measurements that allow us to fully describe the transition between several light-matter interaction regimes. The complete range from linear excitation to the breakdown of the photonic bandgap on to self-induced transmission and self-phase modulation is studied on a high-quality multiple-quantum-well Bragg structure. An improved fast-scanning cross-correlation frequency-resolved optical gating setup is applied to retrieve the pulse phase with an excellent signal-to-noise ratio. Calculations using the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations show qualitative agreement with the experimental findings.
We investigate the temporal and spectral properties of subpicosecond pulses transmitted on the heavy-hole exciton transition through a multiple-quantum-well Bragg structure, exhibiting a one-dimensional photonic band gap. At low light intensities, a temporal propagation beating is observed. This beating is strongly dependent on the optical dephasing time T2{T}_{2}T2​ which is dominated by the radiative interwell coupling. In an intermediate intensity regime, the Pauli-blocking nonlinearity leads to gradual suppression of the photonic band gap and vanishing of the linear propagation beating. For highly nonlinear excitation, we find signatures of self-induced transmission due to Rabi flopping and adiabatic following of the carrier density. Numerical simulations using the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations are in excellent agreement with the experimental data up to intensities for which higher many-particle correlations become more important and self-phase modulation occurs in the sample substrate.
Summary form only given.Free-exciton resonances in semiconductors cannot be treated as bare two-level systems because Coulomb interaction and correlation/exchange effects between the carriers substantially modify the optical Bloch equations that describe the behavior of a two-level system under the influence of an external light field. The semiconductor Bloch equations (SBEs) give a more realistic description of the dynamic response of the system on ultrafast time scales. Therefore, the coherent transients known from two-level systems in atomic physics have been found to be substantially modified in semiconductors. Whereas self-induced transparency (SIT) on bound excitons, which are known to behave as atomiclike two-level systems, has been found, the question whether SIT could also appear on a free-exciton resonance is still subject of controversial discussions. We addressed this problem in a combined theory-experiment study.