No Arabic abstract
We use an atomistic model to consider the effect of shape symmetry breaking on the optical properties of self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dots. In particular, we investigate the energy level structure and optical activity of the lowest energy excitons in these nanostructures. We compare between quantum dots with two-fold rotational and two reflections (C2v) symmetry and quantum dots in which this symmetry was reduced to one reflection only (Cs) by introducing a facet between the quantum dots and the host material. We show that the symmetry reduction mostly affects the optical activity of the dark exciton. While in symmetric quantum dots, one of the dark exciton eigenstates has a small dipole moment polarized along the symmetry axis (growth direction) of the quantum dot, in non-symmetric ones, the two dark excitons dipole moments are predominantly cross-linearly polarized perpendicular to the growth direction and reveal pronounced polarization anisotropy. Our model calculations agree quantitatively with recently obtained experimental data.
Quantum dots are arguably one of the best platforms for optically accessible spin based qubits. The paramount demand of extended qubit storage time can be met by using quantum-dot-confined dark exciton: a longlived electron-hole pair with parallel spins. Despite its name the dark exciton reveals weak luminescence that can be directly measured. The origins of this optical activity remain largely unexplored. In this work, using the atomistic tight-binding method combined with configuration-interaction approach, we demonstrate that atomic-scale randomness strongly affects oscillator strength of dark excitons confined in self-assembled cylindrical InGaAs quantum dots with no need for faceting or shape-elongation. We show that this process is mediated by two mechanisms: mixing dark and bright configurations by exchange interaction, and equally important appearance of non-vanishing optical transition matrix elements that otherwise correspond to nominally forbidden transitions in a non-alloyed case. The alloy randomness has essential impact on both bright and dark exciton states, including their energy, emission intensity, and polarization angle. We conclude that, due to the atomic-scale alloy randomness, finding dots with desired dark exciton properties may require exploration of a large ensemble, similarly to how dots with low bright exciton splitting are selected for entanglement generation.
We study spin dynamics of excitons confined in self-assembled CdSe quantum dots by means of optical orientation in magnetic field. At zero field the exciton emission from QDs populated via LO phonon-assisted absorption shows a circular polarization of 14%. The polarization degree of the excitonic emission increases dramatically when a magnetic field is applied. Using a simple model, we extract the exciton spin relaxation times of 100 ps and 2.2 ns in the absence and presence of magnetic field, respectively. With increasing temperature the polarization of the QD emission gradually decreases. Remarkably, the activation energy which describes this decay is independent of the external magnetic field, and, therefore, of the degeneracy of the exciton levels in QDs. This observation implies that the temperature-induced enhancement of the exciton spin relaxation is insensitive to the energy level degeneracy and can be attributed to the same excited state distribution.
Polaron dephasing processes are investigated in InAs/GaAs dots using far-infrared transient four wave mixing (FWM) spectroscopy. We observe an oscillatory behaviour in the FWM signal shortly (< 5 ps) after resonant excitation of the lowest energy conduction band transition due to coherent acoustic phonon generation. The subsequent single exponential decay yields long intraband dephasing times of 90 ps. We find excellent agreement between our measured and calculated FWM dynamics, and show that both real and virtual acoustic phonon processes are necessary to explain the temperature dependence of the polarization decay.
The radiative recombination rates of interacting electron-hole pairs in a quantum dot are strongly affected by quantum correlations among electrons and holes in the dot. Recent measurements of the biexciton recombination rate in single self-assembled quantum dots have found values spanning from two times the single exciton recombination rate to values well below the exciton decay rate. In this paper, a Feynman path-integral formulation is developed to calculate recombination rates including thermal and many-body effects. Using real-space Monte Carlo integration, the path-integral expressions for realistic three-dimensional models of InGaAs/GaAs, CdSe/ZnSe, and InP/InGaP dots are evaluated, including anisotropic effective masses. Depending on size, radiative rates of typical dots lie in the regime between strong and intermediate confinement. The results compare favorably to recent experiments and calculations on related dot systems. Configuration interaction calculations using uncorrelated basis sets are found to be severely limited in calculating decay rates.
Measuring single-electron charge is one of the most fundamental quantum technologies. Charge sensing, which is an ingredient for the measurement of single spins or single photons, has been already developed for semiconductor gate-defined quantum dots, leading to intensive studies on the physics and the applications of single-electron charge, single-electron spin and photon-electron quantum interface. However, the technology has not yet been realized for self-assembled quantum dots despite their fascinating quantum transport phenomena and outstanding optical functionalities. In this paper, we report charge sensing experiments in self-assembled quantum dots. We choose two adjacent dots, and fabricate source and drain electrodes on each dot, in which either dot works as a charge sensor for the other target dot. The sensor dot current significantly changes when the number of electrons in the target dot changes by one, demonstrating single-electron charge sensing. We have also demonstrated real-time detection of single-electron tunnelling events. This charge sensing technique will be an important step towards combining efficient electrical readout of single-electron with intriguing quantum transport physics or advanced optical and photonic technologies developed for self-assembled quantum dots.