  A picosecond acoustic pulse can be used to control the lasing emission from
semiconductor nanostructures by shifting their electronic transitions. When the
active medium, here an ensemble of (In,Ga)As quantum dots, is shifted into or
out of resonance with the cavity mode, a large enhancement or suppression of
the lasing emission can dynamically be achieved. Most interesting, even in the
case when gain medium and cavity mode are in resonance, we observe an
enhancement of the lasing due to shaking by coherent phonons. In order to
understand the interactions of the non-linearly coupled photon-exciton-phonon
subsystems, we develop a semiclassical model and find an excellent agreement
between theory and experiment.
