Forcibly driven coherent soft phonons in GeTe with intense THz-rate pump fields

We propose an experimental technique to generate large amplitude coherent phonons with irradiation of THz-rate pump pulses and to study the dynamics of phase transition in GeTe ferroelectrics. When a single pump pulse irradiates the sample at various pump power densities, the frequency of the soft phonon decreases sub-linearly and saturates at higher pump powers. By contrast, when THz-rate pump pulse sequence irradiates the sample at matched time intervals to forcibly drive the oscillation, a large red-shift of the phonon frequency is observed without saturation effects. After excitation with a four pump pulse sequence, the coherent soft phonon becomes strongly damped leading to a near critical damping condition. This condition indicates that the lattice is driven to a precursor state of the phase transition.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Optical properties of asymmetric coupled CuCl microcavities

We report the optical properties of the asymmetric coupled CuCl microcavities, consisting of one optically active CuCl-cavity and one empty-cavity, fabricated by vacuum deposition method. It is found that the energies of the peaks observed in the angle-resolved transmittance spectra of the coupled microcavity change with the incident angle of light, and show the anticrossing behaviors around the crossing points between the exciton modes of the CuCl-cavity and the photon mode of the empty-cavity. We discuss the incident angle dependence by taking account of the coupling between two photon modes of the CuCl-cavity and the empty-cavity

Characteristics of coherent transverse optical phonon in CuI thin films on Au nano-films

We have investigated the coherent phonon in CuI thin films deposited on Au films with nanoscale roughness. It is found that the coherent transverse optical (TO) phonon in the CuI thin film on the Au film is dramatically enhanced, whereas that in the CuI thin film without the Au film is hardly observed. The enhancement of the coherent TO phonon in the CuI thin film on the Au film will originate from the surface enhanced electric field around the surface of the Au film with nanoscale roughness. To clarify the properties of the enhanced coherent phonon, we have investigated the pump-power dependence and pump-polarization dependence of the coherent phonon. We discuss the generation process of the coherent phonon in the CuI thin film on the Au film as compared with the pump-power dependence and the pump-polarization dependence

Thickness dependence of photoluminescence-decay profiles of exciton-exciton scattering in ZnO thin films

We have investigated the photoluminescence (PL) dynamics of ZnO thin films under intense excitation conditions using an optical-Kerr-gating method. The PL bands originating from exciton-exciton scattering (P emission) and biexciton (M emission) have been observed at 10 K. The ultrashort gating time of 0.6 ps has enabled us to obtain precise information of the temporal profiles of the peak energies and the intensities of the P- and M-PL bands. We have found that the decay time of the P emission becomes longer with increasing film thickness, while that of the M emission is independent of the film thickness. Although the decay time of the P emission is an increasing function of the film thickness, the relation is not in proportion, which is contrary to the predicted proportionality based on a simple model of photon-like polariton propagation

Normal mode analysis of a relaxation process with Bayesian inference

Measurements of relaxation processes are essential in many fields, including nonlinear optics. Relaxation processes provide many insights into atomic/molecular structures and the kinetics and mechanisms of chemical reactions. For the analysis of these processes, the extraction of modes that are specific to the phenomenon of interest (normal modes) is unavoidable. In this study we propose a framework to systematically extract normal modes from the viewpoint of model selection with Bayesian inference. Our approach consists of a well-known method called sparsity-promoting dynamic mode decomposition, which decomposes a mixture of damped oscillations, and the Bayesian model selection framework. We numerically verify the performance of our proposed method by using coherent phonon signals of a bismuth polycrystal and virtual data as typical examples of relaxation processes. Our method succeeds in extracting the normal modes even from experimental data with strong backgrounds. Moreover, the selected set of modes is robust to observation noise, and our method can estimate the level of observation noise. From these observations, our method is applicable to normal mode analysis, especially for data with strong backgrounds