We report on a new approach to detect excitonic qubits in semiconductor quantum dots by observing spontaneous emissions from the relevant qubit level. The ground state of excitons is resonantly excited by picosecond optical pulses. Emissions from the same state are temporally resolved with picosecond time resolution. To capture weak emissions, we greatly suppress the elastic scattering of excitation beams, by applying obliquely incident geometry to the micro photoluminescence set-up. Rabi oscillations of the ground-state excitons appear to be involved in the dependence of emission intensity on excitation amplitude.
We study the exciton spin relaxation in CdTe self-assembled quantum dots by using polarized photoluminescence spectroscopy in magnetic field. The experiments on single CdTe quantum dots and on large quantum dot ensembles show that by combining phonon-assisted absorption with circularly polarized resonant excitation the spin-polarized excitons are photo-excited directly into the ground states of quantum dots. We find that for single symmetric quantum dots at B=0 T, where the exciton levels are degenerate, the spins randomize very rapidly, so that no net spin polarization is observed. In contrast, when this degeneracy is lifted by applying external magnetic field, optically created spin-polarized excitons maintain their polarization on a time scale much longer than the exciton recombination time. We also observe that the exciton spin polarization is conserved when the splitting between exciton states is caused by quantum dot shape asymmetry. Similar behavior is found in a large ensemble of CdTe quantum dots. These results show that while exciton spins scatter rapidly between degenerate states, the spin relaxation time increases by orders of magnitude as the exciton spin states in a quantum dot become non-degenerate. Finally, due to strong electronic confinement in CdTe quantum dots, the large spin polarization of excitons shows no dependence on the number of phonons emitted between the virtual state and the exciton ground state during the excitation.
We demonstrate a new method of measuring the exciton spin relaxation time in semiconductor nanostructures by continuous-wave photoluminescence. We find that for self-assembled CdTe quantum dots the degree of circular polarization of emission is larger when exciting polarized excitons into the lower energy spin state than in the case when the excitons are excited into the higher energy spin state. A simple rate equation model gives the exciton spin relaxation time in CdTe quantum dots equal to 4.8+/-0.3 ns, significantly longer than the quantum dot exciton recombination time 300 ps.
Excited-state relaxations in molecules are responsible for a red shift of the absorption peak with respect to the emission peak (Franck-Condon shift). The magnitude of this shift in semiconductor quantum dots is still unknown. Here we report first-principle calculations of excited-state relaxations in small (diameter < 2.2 nm) Si nanocrystals, showing that the Franck-Condon shift is surprisingly large (~60 meV for a 2.2 nm-diameter nanocrystal). The physical mechanism of the excited-state relaxations changes abruptly around 1 nanoeter in size, providing a clear demarcation between ``molecules and ``nanocrystals.
We present a fully three-dimensional study of the multiexciton optical response of vertically coupled GaN-based quantum dots via a direct-diagonalization approach. The proposed analysis is crucial in understanding the fundamental properties of few-particle/exciton interactions and, more important, may play an essential role in the design/optimization of semiconductor-based quantum information processing schemes. In particular, we focus on the interdot exciton-exciton coupling, key ingredient in recently proposed all-optical quantum processors. Our analysis demonstrates that there is a large window of realistic parameters for which both biexcitonic shift and oscillator strength are compatible with such implementation schemes.
A highly sensitive charge detector is realized for a quantum dot in an InAs nanowire. We have developed a self-aligned etching process to fabricate in a single step a quantum point contact in a two-dimensional electron gas and a quantum dot in an InAs nanowire. The quantum dot is strongly coupled to the underlying point contact which is used as a charge detector. The addition of one electron to the quantum dot leads to a change of the conductance of the charge detector by typically 20%. The charge sensitivity of the detector is used to measure Coulomb diamonds as well as charging events outside the dot. Charge stability diagrams measured by transport through the quantum dot and charge detection merge perfectly.