Abstract

It is expected that a uniaxial stress applied in the plane of multiple quantum wells (MQW’s) should result in an anisotropic excitoitic absorption of linearly polarized light incident normal to the structure due to the mixing of the heavy- and light-hole states.¹ In this paper we report the first measurement, to our knowledge, of an ultrafast persistent large-angle polarization rotation created by photoinduced bleaching of this absorption, which, unlike the very small (~1°), rapidly decaying rotation associated with anisotropic k-space filling in unstressed bulk GaAs,² exhibits a slow decrease primarily determined by the rate of carrier removal from the wells.

© 1993 Optical Society of America