Spectral hole burning and light-induced band splitting in the gain region of highly excited semiconductors

A many-body analysis of spectral hole burning and light-induced band renormalization in the gain region of an initially inverted semiconductor is presented. The results are based on the numerical solution of the semiconductor Bloch equations, specialized to the case of noncopropagating pump-and-probe light fields. These equations account for coherent pump-probe scattering and include the Coulomb correlation between charge carriers. They also contain optical dephasing and carrier-carrier scattering rates that are computed within the random-phase approximation.