Forcibly driven coherent soft phonons in GeTe with intense THz-rate pump fields

We propose an experimental technique to generate large amplitude coherent phonons with irradiation of THz-rate pump pulses and to study the dynamics of phase transition in GeTe ferroelectrics. When a single pump pulse irradiates the sample at various pump power densities, the frequency of the soft phonon decreases sublinearly and saturates at higher pump powers. By contrast, when the THz-rate pump pulse sequence irradiates the sample at matched time intervals to forcibly drive oscillation, a large redshift of the phonon frequency is observed without any saturation effects. After excitation with a four pump pulse sequence, the coherent soft phonon becomes strongly damped and leads to a near critical damping condition. This condition indicates that the lattice is driven to a precursor state of the phase transition. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.