For a semiconductor alloy with a predominant disorder scattering, we show that, under appropriate conditions, electrons photoexcited by a short strong light pulse form a coherent transient at first, while the incoherently backscattered electrons take over only gradually, with a time lag comparable with the pulse duration. The time evolution of the electron distribution is obtained by a direct evaluation of the non-equilibrium Green function.
On the example of an explicitly solvable model of a semiconductor with alloy disorder in the conduction band, it is shown that a slowly varying exciting light pulse can be treated in an adiabatic approximation, that is, the self-energy of an electron can be taken as a continuously evolving series of snapshots of self-energies corresponding to a steady illumination with the instantaneous value of the light strength.
The quasiparticle states in strongly illuminated semiconductors are light hybridized electron and hole states, Galickii quasiparticles. Their properties, especially if they are photoexcited at small detunings, may be rather complex. A protracted formation period is followed by quantum beats of two decaying resonances corresponding to both sides of the hybridization gap. On an example of elastic scattering on an alloy disorder, these phenomena are demonstrated and analyzed in terms of poles of the retarded Green function and the corresponding residuals.
The new experiments on the response of electrons in semiconductors to femtosecond optical pulses call for developing adequate theoretical tools. A promising approach has been found in using the non-equilibrium Green functions approximately factorized on the basis of the so-called generalized Kadanoff-Baym ansatz. The present work investigates the validity of such approach on an example of a semiconductor with an alloy scattering, where the coherent potential approximation allows to construct the non-equilibrium Green functions directly, so that an explicit comparison with the ansatz decoupling is possible. The ansatz for the electron distribution is in this case justified as far as the quasiparticle picture for the individual electrons is appropriate.
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