Optical nonlinearities and phase relaxation of excitons in GaN

We have studied the properties of coherent exciton states in a free standing wurtzite GaN using the degenerate four-wave-mixing (FWM) technique with subpicosecond time resolution. The polarization dependence of spectrally resolved FWM signals has demonstrated that excitation-induced dephasing is the dominant FWM process. The exciton energy renormalization has been found to dependent on the polarization configuration. FWM signals due to local field effect have been successfully discriminated from those due to other effects. These reveal an importance of four-particle correlations in two-exciton continuum states even for the low excitation power limit where no bound biexciton signal is detected. The temperature dependence of the homogeneous broadening of excitons has also been studied up to 60 K, to obtain the exciton-acoustic phonon interaction coefficient of 9 μeV/K.