We report our experimental studies on the time-resolved dynamics of conduction electrons in high quality AlxGa1-xN
single crystals. The AlxGa1-xN synthesis with the Al content of up to 90% was performed using a solution growth
technique in a high nitrogen pressure system, maintained for several days under the high (up to 15 kBar) gas pressure
and at very high (up to 1800°C) temperatures. The resulting crystals were colorless (fully transparent to visible light)
platelets up to ~1 mm2 in size, and exhibited a hexagonal Würtzite structure. Our optical measurements were performed
at room temperature, using a two-color (ultraviolet and near-infrared), femtosecond, pump-probe spectroscopy, by
invoking a two-photon, volume absorption and scanning the normalized transient differential transmitivitty (ΔT/T) signal
of the probe beam. The observed ΔT/T signal was a superposition of a femtosecond, two-photon-absorption (TPA)
correlation transient and a conventional optical pump-probe photoresponse signal with a rise time of ~1 ps and decay of
~75 ps. We have found that the TPA process was quite efficient with the absorption coefficient β ≈ 0.337 cm/GW at 380
nm, and enabled us to directly determine that the optical bandgap of AlxGa1-xN (x = 0.86) was 5.81 +/-0.01 eV. The latter
value is in the good agreement with the one deduced from the x-ray diffraction measurements.
We report our experimental and theoretical studies on the time-resolved dynamics of conduction electrons and coherent
acoustic phonons (CAPs) in high quality GaN single crystals. Our measurements were performed using a two-color
(ultraviolet and near-infrared), femtosecond, pump-probe spectroscopy by scanning the transient differential reflectivity
(ΔR/R) signal of the probe beam. We have found that the threshold for the intervalley transition of electrons between the
conduction band Γ and L valleys appears at the energy of 4.51 eV at 300 K and it increases to 4.57 eV at 100 K. We
have also numerically simulated intervalley scattering dynamics and found that the characteristic scattering time
constants were temperature independent and fitted extremely well our experimental data. The electron scattering time
from the Γ to L valley was limited by the 150-fs width of our pump pulses, while the return process of electrons from L
to Γ was characterized by the scattering time of 1 ps, and the total depopulation time of the L valley was ~20 ps. On the
exponentially decaying part of the ΔR/R transient, we have observed pronounced CAP oscillations with the intrinsic
lifetime of at least 100 ns. The CAP amplitude was only dependent on the pump photon energy, while the oscillation
frequency was dispersionless (proportional to the probe-beam wave vector) with the slope (velocity of the acoustic
phonon propagation) determined by the speed of sound in GaN. The CAP characteristics agreed well with a developed
theoretical model.
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