Experimental observation of spin-dependent electron many-body effects in CdTe

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.