Anisotropic homogeneous linewidth of the heavy-hole exciton in (110)-oriented GaAs quantum wells

The homogeneous and inhomogeneous linewidths of the heavy-hole exciton resonance in a (110)-oriented GaAs multiple-quantum-well sample are measured using optical two-dimensional Fourier transform spectroscopy. By probing the optical nonlinear response for polarization along the in-plane crystal axes [110] and [001], we measure different homogeneous linewidths for the two orthogonal directions. This difference is found to be due to anisotropic excitation-induced dephasing, caused by a crystal-axis-dependent absorption coefficient. The extrapolated zero-excitation density homogeneous linewidth exhibits an activation-like temperature dependence. We find that the homogeneous linewidth extrapolated to zero excitation density and temperature is ~34 mu eV, while the inhomogeneous linewidth is ~1.9 meV for both polarizations.