The recently developed spectroscopic transient reflecting grating technique with a time resolution of 200 fs was applied to a silicon surface under the pump intensity of more than 1 mJ/cm2. This method provides information on excited free carrier dynamics and subsequent heat generation and diffusion selectively based on appropriate choice of probe wavelength. With regard to the thermal component, the temperature at the surface increased within several picoseconds and then decayed after about 300 ps. As the pump intensity was increased, the maximum temperature rise showed a nonlinear dependence on it, and also the temperature rise time became faster. The results led to the conclusion that the carrier dynamics causing a temperature rise at a silicon surface is dominated mainly by Auger recombination, not by the decay to a band edge under the high carrier density conditions.
The simultaneous detections of transient reflectivity (TR), transient reflecting first and second order diffraction signals, at a silicon surface revealed that each signal reflected different physical processes of carrier dynamics under a high pump power of 5 mJ/cm2. It was shown that the second order diffraction could detect a refractive index change which was not linearly dependent on the excited carrier density, and it was suggested that the nonlinearity was caused by many-body interactions among carriers at the band-edge states. The dynamics observed with the second order diffraction corresponded to the recombination of the band-edge carriers. Analysis of the first and second order diffractions in combination with the recently developed spectroscopic detection provided selective information on the ultrafast carrier and heat dynamics for a silicon surface, that is, carrier-phonon scattering, recombination of carriers, heat generation, and diffusion. Additionally, it was shown the TR might allow observation of mixed physical processes detected by the first and second order diffractions and it was suggested that deducing exact physical processes only from the TR signal, especially under high pump power conditions, was difficult.
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