Theoretical study of solitonlike propagation of picosecond light pulses interacting with Wannier excitons

An analytical and numerical study of light pulse propagation in semiconductors, with pulses spectrally centered at the lowest exciton resonance, is presented. It is shown that, in the limit of negligible phase-space blocking effects, the equation for the excitonic polarization is equivalent to a modified version of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, for which soliton solutions have been derived by Mihalache et al. [D. Mihalache et al., Phys. Rev. A 47, 3190 (1993)]. The numerical study demonstrates the solitonlike propagation of experimentally relevant input pulses in CdSe crystal and assesses the influence of phase-space blocking effects and dephasing processes.