As an alternative to commonly used electrical methods, we have investigated the optical pumping of charged exciton complexes addressing impurity related transitions with photons of the appropriate energy. Under these conditions, we demonstrate that the pumping fidelity can be very high while still maintaining a switching behavior between the different excitonic species. This mechanism has been investigated for single quantum dots of different size present in the same sample and compared with the direct injection of spectator electrons from nearby donors.
We present a microscopic theory of the optical properties of self-assembled quantum dots doped with a single magnetic manganese (Mn) impurity and containing a controlled number of electrons. The single-particle electron and heavy-hole electronic shells are described by two-dimensional harmonic oscillators. The electron-electron, electron-hole Coulomb as well as the short-range electron spin-Mn spin and hole spin-Mn spin contact exchange interactions are included. The electronic states of the photo-excited electron-hole-Mn complex and of the final electron-Mn complex are expanded in a finite number of configurations and the full interacting Hamiltonian is diagonalized numerically. The emission spectrum is predicted as a function of photon energy for a given number of electrons and different number of confined electronic quantum dot shells. We show how emission spectra allow to identify the number of electronic shells, the number of electrons populating these shells and, most importantly, their spin. We show that electrons not interacting directly with the spin of Mn ion do so via electron-electron interactions. This indirect interaction is a strong effect even when Mn impurity is away from the quantum dot center.
The optical spectroscopy of a single InAs quantum dot doped with a single Mn atom is studied using a model Hamiltonian that includes the exchange interactions between the spins of the quantum dot electron-hole pair, the Mn atom and the acceptor hole. Our model permits to link the photoluminescence spectra to the Mn spin states after photon emission. We focus on the relation between the charge state of the Mn, $A^0$ or $A^-$, and the different spectra which result through either band-to-band or band-to-acceptor transitions. We consider both neutral and negatively charged dots. Our model is able to account for recent experimental results on single Mn doped InAs PL spectra and can be used to account for future experiments in GaAs quantum dots. Similarities and differences with the case of single Mn doped CdTe quantum dots are discussed.
We present a magneto-photoluminescence study on neutral and charged excitons confined to InAs/GaAs quantum dots. Our investigation relies on a confocal microscope that allows arbitrary tuning of the angle between the applied magnetic field and the sample growth axis. First, from experiments on neutral excitons and trions, we extract the in-plane and on-axis components of the Lande tensor for electrons and holes in the s-shell. Then, based on the doubly negatively charged exciton magneto-photoluminescence we show that the p-electron wave function spreads significantly into the GaAs barriers. We also demonstrate that the p-electron g-factor depends on the presence of a hole in the s-shell. The magnetic field dependence of triply negatively charged excitons photoluminescence exhibits several anticrossings, as a result of coupling between the quantum dot electronic states and the wetting layer. Finally, we discuss how the system evolves from a Kondo-Anderson exciton description to the artificial atom model when the orientation of the magnetic field goes from Faraday to Voigt geometry.
Semiconducting nanowires (NWs) are a versatile, highly tunable material platform at the heart of many new developments in nanoscale and quantum physics. Here, we demonstrate charge pumping, i.e., the controlled transport of individual electrons through an InAs NW quantum dot (QD) device at frequencies up to $1.3,$GHz. The QD is induced electrostatically in the NW by a series of local bottom gates in a state of the art device geometry. A periodic modulation of a single gate is enough to obtain a dc current proportional to the frequency of the modulation. The dc bias, the modulation amplitude and the gate voltages on the local gates can be used to control the number of charges conveyed per cycle. Charge pumping in InAs NWs is relevant not only in metrology as a current standard, but also opens up the opportunity to investigate a variety of exotic states of matter, e.g. Majorana modes, by single electron spectroscopy and correlation experiments.
We investigate experimentally and theoretically few-particle effects in the optical spectra of single quantum dots (QDs). Photo-depletion of the QD together with the slow hopping transport of impurity-bound electrons back to the QD are employed to efficiently control the number of electrons present in the QD. By investigating structurally identical QDs, we show that the spectral evolutions observed can be attributed to intrinsic, multi-particle-related effects, as opposed to extrinsic QD-impurity environment-related interactions. From our theoretical calculations we identify the distinct transitions related to excitons and excitons charged with up to five additional electrons, as well as neutral and charged biexcitons.