We present a detailed study of a phonon-assisted incoherent excitation mechanism of single quantum dots. A spectrally-detuned laser couples to a quantum dot transition by mediation of acoustic phonons, whereby excitation efficiencies up to 20 % with
respect to strictly resonant excitation can be achieved at T = 9 K. Laser frequency-dependent analysis of the quantum dot intensity distinctly maps the underlying acoustic phonon bath and shows good agreement with our polaron master equation theory. An analytical solution for the photoluminescence is introduced which predicts a broadband incoherent coupling process when electron-phonon scattering is in the strong phonon coupling (polaronic) regime. Additionally, we investigate the coherence properties of the emitted light and study the impact of the relevant pump and phonon bath parameters.
We present a semiconductor master equation technique to study the input/output characteristics of coherent photon transport in a semiconductor waveguide-cavity system containing a single quantum dot. We use this approach to investigate the effects of
photon propagation and anharmonic cavity-QED for various dot-cavity interaction strengths, including weakly-coupled, intermediately-coupled, and strongly-coupled regimes. We demonstrate that for mean photon numbers much less than 0.1, the commonly adopted weak excitation (single quantum) approximation breaks down, even in the weak coupling regime. As a measure of the anharmonic multiphoton-correlations, we compute the Fano factor and the correlation error associated with making a semiclassical approximation. We also explore the role of electron--acoustic-phonon scattering and find that phonon-mediated scattering plays a qualitatively important role on the light propagation characteristics. As an application of the theory, we simulate a conditional phase gate at a phonon bath temperature of $20 $K in the strong coupling regime.
