Generation of an ultra-short electrical pulse with width shorter than the excitation laser

We demonstrate experimentally a rare phenomenon that the width of an electrical response is shorter than that of the excitation laser. In this work, generation of an ultrashort electrical pulse is by a semi-insulating GaAs photoconductive semiconductor switch (PCSS) and the generated electrical pulse width is shorter than that of the excitation laser from diode laser. When the pulse width and energy of the excitation laser are fixed at 25.7 ns and 1.6 μJ respectively, the width of the generated electrical pulse width by 3-mm-gap GaAs PCSS at the bias voltage of 9 kV is only 7.3 ns. The model of photon-activated charge domain (PACD) is used to explain the peculiar phenomenon in our experiment. The ultrashort electrical pulse width is mainly relevant to the time interval of PACD from occurrence to disappearance in the mode. The shorter the time interval is, the narrower the electrical pulse width will become. In more general terms, our result suggests that in nonlinear regime a response signal can have a much short width than the excitation pulses. The result clearly indicates that generating ultrashort electrical pulses can be achieved without the need of ultrashort lasers.