Coherent acoustic phonons in phonon cavities investigated by asynchronous optical sampling

Abstract

Using a recently introduced measurement technique, called asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS), we have investigated the dynamics of coherent acoustic phonons in a semiconductor heterostructure composed of a GaAs film between two GaAs/AlAs superlattices, serving as a cavity for acoustic phonons. Measurements were performed at liquid helium temperatures. The possibility to perform two-color pump-probe spectroscopy allowed us to tune the probe pulse energy to the cavity band gap, while sweeping the pump pulse energy over the superlattice resonance. The large measurement window of 1 ns in combination with a resolution of about 150 fs made a detailed analysis of the observed phonon dynamics possible. We observed a long lived oscillation in the gap of the phonon dispersion at 466 GHz, which we attribute to a cavity mode. © 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd.