Trapped electronic states in YAG crystal excited by femtosecond radiation

The excitation of an electronic subsystem of an yttrium aluminum garnet by 800 nm femtosecond radiation was studied theoretically and experimentally. The spatio-temporal dynamics of the refractive index (n) inside the beam waist was explored by means of the pump-probe interferometric technique with a submicron resolution. The observed increase in n indicated the formation of bound electronic states relaxed for ∝ 150 ps. We showed that the experimental data agreed with the computational simulation based on the numerical solution of the nonlinear Schroedinger equation only if these transient states were considered to arise from a direct light-induced process but not from the decay of radiatively generated free-electron-hole pairs. (orig.)