Impulsive excitation of coherent phonons observed in reflection in bismuth and antimony

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We report time domain observations of coherent lattice vibrations in bismuth and antimony. Phonons are impulsively generated, and detected through reflectivity modulation with 70 fs pulses of laser light at 1.98 eV. With this technique, we demonstrate that coherent lattice oscillations can be studied by reflection in opaque materials, but with selection rules which may differ from conventional impulsive stimulated Raman scattering.