Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2011

Abstract

We report the first experimental evidence for the resonant excitation of coherent high-frequency acoustic phonons in semiconducting doping superstructures by far-infrared laser radiation. After a grating-coupled delta-doped silicon doping superlattice is illuminated with ~1 kW/mm2 nanosecond-pulsed 246 GHz laser radiation, a delayed nanosecond pulse is detected by a superconducting bolometer at a time corresponding to the appropriate time-of-flight for ballistic longitudinal acoustic phonons across the (100) silicon substrate. The absorbed phonon power density in the microbolometer is observed to be ~10 μW/mm2, in agreement with theory. The phonon pulse duration also matches the laser pulse duration. The absence of any delayed transverse acoustic phonon signal by the superconducting bolometer is particularly striking and implies there is little or no incoherent phonon generation occurring in the process.

Comments

This article first appeared in the March 2011 issue of Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Delivered July 7, 2010 at 2nd Int. Symposium on Laser Ultrasonics – LU2010, Bordeaux, France.

The version of record is available on the publisher’s site at http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/278/1/012028/.

Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. Copyright 2011 the authors. Published under a CC BY-NC-SA licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/278/1/012028

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