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Physical Review Letters

Self-Induced Transmission on a Free Exciton Resonance in a Semiconductor

Harald W. Giessen, A. Knorr, S. Haas, S. W. Koch, Stefan Lindén, J. Kühl, M. Hetterich, Michael Grün, Claus F. Klingshirn

Published Nov 9, 1998• 107 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We observe coherent long-distance propagation of an optical pulse in resonance with the free exciton at high light intensities in an optically thick semiconductor. The experiments show pulse reshaping, pulse breakup, and a high degree of transmission. Microscopic calculations using the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations yield good agreement with the experimental data.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.81.4260

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We observe coherent long-distance propagation of an optical pulse in resonance with the free exciton at high light intensities in an optically thick semiconductor. The experiments show pulse reshaping, pulse breakup, and a high degree of transmission. Microscopic calculations using the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations yield good agreement with the experimental data.
The nonlinear optical properties of semiconductors near an excitonic resonance are investigated theoretically by using the macroscopic J model [\"Ostreich and Knorr, Phys. Rev. B 48, 17811 (1993); \"Ostreich and Knorr, Phys. Rev. B 50, 5717 (1994)] based on the microscopic semiconductor Bloch equations. These nonlinear properties cause modulational instability of long light pulses with large gain and give rise to a self-induced transmission of short light pulses in a semiconductor. By an example of the latter well-studied effect, the validity of the used macroscopic model is demonstrated, and good agreement is found with both existing theoretical and experimental results.
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.
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.
Summary form only given. High-intensity pulse propagation of femtosecond laser pulses in optically thick semiconductor crystals can lead to self-induced transmission when the laser is tuned to a free exciton resonance. This effect means that at intensities on the order of MW/cm/sup 2/, pulses in the subpicosecond range lead to Rabi flopping of the carrier density. This causes the pulses to break up temporally after long-distance coherent propagation. The effect depends strongly on the coherence of the incident light field with the polarization of the exciton transition created in the semiconductor. Despite the expected excitation-induced dephasing, a large amount of coherent nonlinear transmission and a high contrast ratio of the Rabi flops are found at sample temperatures /spl les/10 K. In order to study the dynamics of the coherently driven polarization and the dependence on external dephasing, we introduced phonon-scattering by raising the temperature of our samples. The experiments were conducted with 800 fs pulses of an optical parametric amplifier in epitaxially grown CdSe. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the coherent coupling of the free carrier polarization to the driving field of a high-intensity subpicosecond pulse with an area larger than /spl pi/ effectively prevents the expected dephasing by carrier-carrier scattering. Opening an additional dephasing channel by introducing phonon-scattering gradually weakens the coupling and suppresses characteristic features of self-induced transmission.
Femtosecond-pulse propagation in resonantly excited semiconductors is investigated by numerically solving the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations for plane waves. For excitation at the exciton resonance, it is shown that the pulse absorption exhibits a strongly nonlinear dependence on the input pulse area. Very long propagation distances for strong pulses are observed, but even when all dephasing processes have been neglected, no lossless propagation (self-induced transparency) was found. The influence of the electron-hole many-body effects, nonequilibrium carrier relaxation, and optical dephasing on the pulse-propagation dynamics is studied. The exchange interaction in the electron-hole plasma is shown to support large propagation distances. For excitation of the continuum states, the dependence of the absorption on the intensity of the input pulse is reduced due to the rapid carrier relaxation into quasiequilibrium distributions.