Ultrahigh Off-Resonant Field Effects in Semiconductors

The excitation of semiconductors with short, off-resonant, high-power terahertz pulses yields extremely nonlinear, ultrafast, dynamical processes including very-high harmonic generation, the occurence of high-order sidebands, dynamical Bloch oscillations, as well as quasi-particle collisions. This review overviews the experimental findings and the microscopic theory used for the consistent quantitative analysis of the observations.