Determinstic Generation of a Quantum Dot-Confined Triexciton and its Radiative Decay via Three-Photon Cascade

Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have potential applications in quantum information processing due to the fact that they are potential on-demand sources of single and entangled photons. Generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs was demonstrated using the biexciton-exciton radiative cascade. One obvious way to increase the number of quantum correlated photons that the QDs emit is to use higher-order multiexcitons, in particular the triexciton. Towards achieving this goal, we first demonstrate deterministic generation of the QD-confined triexciton in a well-definedcoherent state and then spectrally identify and directly measure a three-photon radiative cascade resulting from the sequential triexciton-biexciton-exciton radiative recombination.

Determinisitic Writing and Control of the Dark Exciton Spin using Short Single Optical Pulses

We demonstrate that the quantum dot-confined dark exciton forms a long-lived integer spin solid state qubit which can be deterministically on-demand initiated in a pure state by one optical pulse. Moreover, we show that this qubit can be fully controlled using short optical pulses, which are several orders of magnitude shorter than the life and coherence times of the qubit. Our demonstrations do not require an externally applied magnetic field and they establish that the quantum dot-confined dark exciton forms an excellent solid state matter qubit with some advantages over the half-integer spin qubits such as the confined electron and hole, separately. Since quantum dots are semiconductor nanostructures that allow integration of electronic and photonic components, the dark exciton may have important implications on implementations of quantum technologies consisting of semiconductor qubits.