Thickness-tunable terahertz plasma oscillations in a semiconductor slab excited by femtosecond optical pulses

We report on the observation of terahertz oscillations in an electron-hole plasma optically excited by a femtosecond pulse in the mu m-sized slab of low-temperature-grown-GaAs (LT-GaAs) grown on the GaAs substrate. The frequency of oscillations is shown to be inversely proportional to the slab thickness. It is suggested that the LT-GaAs slab serves as a resonant cavity for traveling plasma waves, which have been generated as a consequence of the shock interaction of photoexcited electron plasma with the GaAs/LT-GaAs interface. The instantaneous diffusion of photoexcited plasma inward the material is driven by the density gradient over the Beer's law distributed carrier population and is evidenced to be a main reason of the shock interaction in the localized plasma. The frequencies of oscillations observed are 3.5 times larger that the inverse electron transit time in the LT-GaAs slab, suggesting the "ballistic" regime for plasma wave propagation to occur. The oscillations have been observed in the photocurrent autocorrelation measurements. The dynamical electric field at the GaAs/LT-GaAs interface arising due to the instantaneous diffusion of photoexcited electrons inward the material was studied through the transient reflectivity change responses, which have been measured simultaneously with photocurrent.