We show that at low carrier energies and densities the carriers in a two-dimensional Coulomb gas interact via classical unscreened carrier-carrier collisions. This allows us to calculate exactly the thermalization due to the two-dimensional carrier-carrier collisions in a nonthermal low-density (≈10^{10} cm^{-2}) two-dimensional plasma excited near the band edge of an undoped GaAs quantum well. The thermalization is found to be 10-15 times slower than the 200 fs thermalization deduced from the previous spectral-hole burning measurements, which means that the spectral hole does not reflect the thermalization process. We also show that the Born approximation fails in describing such carrier-carrier collisions.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.