Physical mechanism of coherent acoustic phonons generation and detection in GaAs semiconductor

We first describe the picosecond acoustic interferometry study of GaAs with twocolors pump-probe laser pulses. The dependence of the generation process on the pump wavelength and the detection process on the probe wavelength both can cause the shift in the phase of the Brillouin signal. Secondly, in order to distinguish the short high frequency wideband acoustic pulse from low frequency Brillouin contribution, we accomplished experiments with (100)GaAs semiconductor coated by a transparent and photoelastically inactive thin film, serving a delay line for the acoustic pulse. Even with highly penetrating pump light (ξ ≈ 680nm), short acoustic disturbances of ≈ 7ps of duration have been registered.