Orbital Angular Momentum Spectral Dynamics of GaN Excitons Excited by Optical Vortices

We report on the coherent dynamics of the photoexcited orbital angular momentum (OAM) states of GaN excitons. The measurements were performed by a pump-probe four-wave mixing (FWM) using optical vortex (OV) pulses, where the pump OV pulse transfers its OAM to the center of mass momentum of excitons and the conversion of OAM via FWM with the probe pulse is detected. Especially, we performed analysis of the signal using an OAM-resolved spectroscopy, which allows us to evaluate the dephasing dynamics of excitons in time and space. The results indicate that near perfect conversion is achieved using the OV pulses with nonzero OAM and its spatial coherence remains high during the dephasing time, clearly indicating that the excitons keep the OAM transferred by the pump OV. In contrast, the component associated with the imperfect conversion becomes significant when one of the incident pulses intentionally includes an OAM-free component. The effect is clearly confirmed by the FWM excited by the pump with multiple OAM. (C) 2013 The Japan Society of Applied Physics