Picosecond strain pulses generated by a supersonically expanding electron-hole plasma in GaAs

Strain pulses with picosecond duration are generated directly in GaAs by optical excitation from a femtosecond laser. The photons are absorbed in a 15-nm layer near the surface, creating the electron-hole plasma, which diffusively expands into the bulk of the GaAs. At an early time, the drift velocity of the expanding plasma exceeds the speed of longitudinal sound, and the generated strain pulses cannot escape the plasma cloud. Such supersonic generation of strain pulses results in specific temporal and spatial shapes of the generated strain pulses, where the compression part has a much lower amplitude than the tensile part. This phenomenon is studied experimentally at low temperatures and analyzed theoretically based on the wave and diffusion equations for strain and plasma density, respectively. Two mechanisms, deformation potential and thermoelasticity, are responsible for the experimental observations. The relative contributions from these mechanisms are governed by the nonradiative recombination rate in the plasma and depend on the optical excitation density, inducing such nonlinear optoacoustic effects as shortening of the leading strain front and a superlinear/quadratic increase in its amplitude with the rise of pump laser fluence.