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physica status solidi (b)

Optically induced excitation density flops in semiconductors

Steven T. Cundiff, A. Knorr, Jochen Feldmann, Stefan W. Koch, Ernst Otto Göbel, Heinrich. Nickel

Published Mar 1, 1995• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract The optically induced excitation density in a semiconductor multiple quantum well is experimentally observed to go through a maximum at sufficiently high excitation intensity. This is achieved by using the interaction of two copropagating ultrafast optical pulses to extract the temporal dependence of the optically induced polarization, which is proportional to the temporal derivative of the excitation density. Solutions to the Maxwell semiconductor Bloch equations show that the observations are a manifestation of Rabi flopping in semiconductors. The results confirm the presence of many‐body modifications to the Rabi flopping for the excitation conditions used in the experiment.

DOI
10.1002/pssb.2221880128

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Abstract The optically induced excitation density in a semiconductor multiple quantum well is experimentally observed to go through a maximum at sufficiently high excitation intensity. This is achieved by using the interaction of two copropagating ultrafast optical pulses to extract the temporal dependence of the optically induced polarization, which is proportional to the temporal derivative of the excitation density. Solutions to the Maxwell semiconductor Bloch equations show that the observations are a manifestation of Rabi flopping in semiconductors. The results confirm the presence of many‐body modifications to the Rabi flopping for the excitation conditions used in the experiment.
The ready availability of sub-picosecond pulses from mode locked lasers has led to a large number of experiments being performed on the coherent interaction between light and extended electronic states in semiconductors and semiconductor heterostructures [1]. In tandem with these experimental efforts the theoretical understanding of these phenomena has also made significant strides [2]. However, one theoretical prediction which has not been directly experimentally observed is the phenomenon of Rabi-flopping in semiconductors [3]. Rabi-flopping is the oscillation of the excited state population induced by a strong light field. Here we present experimental results based on the nonlinear interaction of two copropagating pulses and show that in the theoretical treatment the observed behavior arises from the occurrence of a Rabi flop.
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.
Abstract The phenomena of Rabi oscillations, resonant pulse propagation, and photon echo in semiconductors are investigated by numerically solving the full semiconductor Bloch equations for the example of bulk CdSe. The calculations are done for resonant femtosecond excitation at the exciton resonance. The many‐body modifications of Rabi flopping and semiconductor photon echo are discussed for a thin medium, whereas the propagation of weak and strong pulses is analyzed for an extended material. Rabi flopping of the density can lead to field reamplification and thus to long propagation distances of sufficiently strong pulses and to pulse break‐up. The area theorem known from self‐induced transparency (SIT) in atomic systems is generalized for the case of phase modulated fields and shown to be modified significantly in semiconductors. Even though no ideal SIT occurs, the Coulomb interacting electron–hole system nevertheless seems to support extremely long propagation distances of so‐called π‐pulses.
The number of complete Rabi oscillations of the electron-hole density induced by square optical pulses with area 2\ensuremath{\pi} is studied using the coherent part of the semiconductor Bloch equations. It is shown that the frequency of the density oscillations depends strongly on the exciton binding frequency, detuning, and the Rabi frequency of the light pulse. The well known doubling of the density oscillation frequency is only observed if the Rabi frequency and exciton binding frequency are approximately of the same order of magnitude. However for strong and weak excitation the semiconductor exhibits properties of atomic systems.
Recently the shortest pulses directly out of a Ti:sapphire laser as short as 6.5fs has been generated by use of single quantum well (SQW) GaAs absorber [1]. Since this laser produces pulses with durations shorter than or comparable to the polarization dephasing time and sufficient power for Rabi flopping of the excited carrier density, the noninstantaneous response of the absorber polarization has to be taken into account. We develope the theory of coherent absorber mode locking taking into account also inhomogeneous broadening of the semiconductor transition by freely movable carriers and Coulomb renormalization of the transition frequency in the scope of semiconductor Bloch equations. Photo-echo measurements in highly excited GaAs yield a decreasing of the effective dephasing with increasing of the laser excited carrier density as T2 ∝ N-1/3. In the SQW absorber the center wavelength of 750nm is well above the bandedge of the GaAs SQW at 870nm and the broad pulse spectrum excites mainly 3D carriers above the confinement depth. We have shown that Rabi-flopping is self-consistently produced due to sub10fs pulse formation at TW/cm2 intensities corresponding to an excited carrier density up to 1020cm-3.