Picosecond separation and measurement of coexisting photorefractive, bound-electronic, and free-carrier grating dynamics in GaAs

A novel transient-grating geometry, which is nondegenerate, copropagating, phase matched, and polarization sensitive, is used to isolate and measure independently the ultrafast dynamics of multiple coexisting gratings in GaAs:EL2 with a temporal resolution of <5 psec. This technique permits the measurement of the evolution of the photorefractive grating in materials with zinc blende symmetry, where the photorefractive grating is usually obscured by the stronger free-carrier and instantaneous bound-electronic gratings.