It is demonstrated that free-carrier plasmons, being well defined collective excitations of the electron gas in the range of small wave vectors, can serve as a sensitive tool to investigate the optical processes related to the small momentum transfers. As an example the system HgSe:Fe is analysed both experimentally and theoretically. It is well known that the excitation of the free-carrier plasma in the light absorption process is possible only in the presence of defects breaking the translational invariance of the system. Due to the overall momentum conservation requirement there must exist a momentum source to make the photon absorption *This work is supported in part by CPBP 01.06. (141
