Semiconductor excitons in strong terahertz fields

Abstract

A microscopic theory for the nonlinear terahertz response of excited semiconductor systems is presented. It is shown that the measurable quantities in typical terahertz transmission/reflection experiments contain large ponderomotive contributions which mask the signatures from terahertz‐induced many‐body transitions. A scheme is developed to remove the ponderomotive contributions and applied to isolate the signatures of Rabi oscillations of an exciton population. (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)