Abstract
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.1 This effect means that at intensities on the order of MW/cm2, 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 ≤10K. The results are in good qualitative and quantitative agreement with numerical solutions of the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations. 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.
© 2001 Optical Society of America
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