Abstract
Ultrafast coherent optical spectroscopy is a valuable technique for investigating the dynamics of various physical phenomena in semiconductors, including exciton dephasing, scattering, and phonon-exciton interaction. In many of these approaches (e.g., four-wave mixing) the polarization of the incident and emitted fields is important for interpretation of the data. An understanding of the related selection rules is essential. Most experiments assume the validity of the circularly polarized selection rules or at most assume a small linear birefringence that just changes the polarization of the radiated field with respect to the excitation field. In the present experiment we examine the free polarization decay and show that in general this assumption is inappropriate; even weak biaxial strain leads to sufficient symmetry breaking that the polarization of the emitted field differs from the incident field and leads to changes in the temporal evolution of the so-called quantum beats.
© 1996 Optical Society of America
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