We present magnetotransport measurements performed on two-dimensional hole gases embedded in carbon doped p-type GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures grown on [001] oriented substrates. A pronounced beating pattern in the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations proves the presence of strong spin-orbit interaction in the device under study. We estimate the effective masses of spin-orbit split subbands by measuring the temperature dependence of the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations at different hole densities. While the lighter heavy-hole effective mass is not energy dependent, the heavier heavy-hole effective mass has a prominent energy dependence, indicating a strong spinorbit induced non parabolicity of the valence band. The measured effective masses show qualitative agreement with self-consistent numerical calculations.The understanding of any semiconductor material starts with the knowledge of the carriers effective mass and its energy dependence. For the most important semiconductors, such as Si and GaAs, the electron effective mass has been widely investigated using temperature dependent transport and cyclotron resonance experiments [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. For two-dimensional hole gases (2DHG) in GaAs the situation is significantly more complicated. Despite the importance of GaAs for fundamental research and technological applications, a detailed study of the effective mass of holes in GaAs 2DHG grown along the high symmetry [001] direction remains to be done. The interpretation of the rapidly increasing number of experiments performed in 2DHGs requires a solid understanding of the physics underlying the effective mass value and its dependence on quantities such as hole density and spinorbit interaction (SOI) strength.Holes in the valence band of GaAs are characterized by wave functions whose symmetry in real space is reminiscent of atomic p-orbitals. Due to the interplay of the non-zero orbital angular momentum, bulk SOI and confinement in growth direction, the carriers in 2DHGs are effectively described as heavy holes with total angular momentum z component ±3/2, for which SOI corrections are expected to be stronger than for their spin-1/2 electronic counterparts. SOI breaks ±3/2 total angular momentum degeneracy already at zero magnetic field, resulting in a band-warping. Accordingly, spin and momentum eigenstates mix, leading to a profound difference between the two spin-orbit-split (SO-split) bands [8]. In p-type 2DHG, the main contribution to SOI is of Rashba type and originates from the structure inversion asymmetry of the host heterostrucure. Unlike the case of electrons, Rashba SOI for holes is expected to have a cubic dependence on the in-plane momentum [9]. With respect to other materials, GaAs 2DHGs offer the unique opportunity to study pronounced SOI effects in a system that can be grown with high control [10,11] and reliably processed into nanostructures [12][13][14][15][16][17]. Furthermore, holes in GaAs have a theoretically predicted effective mass several times larger than electrons in the conduction band. The...