Abstract
In semiconductors, the spin degree of freedom is usually disregarded in the theoretical treatment of electron many-body effects such as band-gap renormalization and screening of the Coulomb enhancement factor. Nevertheless, as was observed experimentally in GaAs, not only the single-particle phase-space filling but also many-body effects are spin sensitive.
In this paper, we report on time- and polarization-resolved differential transmission pump-probe measurements in CdTe, which has the same zincblende crystal structure but different material parameters compared to that of GaAs. We show experimentally that at room temperature in CdTe-unlike in GaAs-the pump-induced decrease of transmission due to the band-gap renormalization can even exceed the transmission increase due to the phase-space filling, which enables to measure directly the spin-sensitivity of the band-gap renormalization.
We also observed that the influence of the band-gap renormalization is more prominent at low temperatures. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.