Influence of light holes on the heavy-hole excitonic optical Stark effect

Abstract

Pump-probe experiments on high-quality ${\mathrm{In}}_{x}{\mathrm{Ga}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}\mathrm{As}$ quantum wells are used to investigate the influence of light-hole excitons on the optical Stark effect. For anticircular polarization of pump and probe pulses and a moderate negative detuning of the pump energy, a redshift of the heavy-hole resonance is observed. However, with increasingly negative detuning a transition from this redshift to a blueshift is found. Microscopic calculations that include both heavy holes and light holes reproduce the experimental results. The theoretical analysis shows that the observation of the redshift depends very sensitively on the detuning of the pump pulses and the heavy-hole to light-hole splitting.