Spectroscopy studies of few particle effects in pyramidal quantum dots

Abstract: In this thesis work two very similar processes have been studied both involving excitations of particles during recombination of exciton complexes in quantum dots, reducing the energy of the emitted photon. Different exciton complexes are defined according to the number of electrons and holes in the quantum dot upon recombination. The neutral exciton complexes with one electron and one hole (X–) and two electrons and two (X+) holes respectively are referred to as the exciton andthe biexciton. Accordingly the charged exciton complexes consisting of two electrons and one hole (X–) and one electron and two holes (X+), respectively, are referred to as negatively- and positively charged excitons, respectively. Whenever another particle is excited during the recombination of one electron-hole pair within these complexes, the result is a weak satellite peak, spectrally redshifted with respect to the main emission peaks related to the exciton complex.In the first part of this thesis work, described in the first two papers, the exciton-LO-phonon interaction is studied with a weak redshifted satellite peak as the signature, referred to as a phonon replica. The intensity ratio between the replicas and the corresponding main emission were determined from the obtained microphotoluminescencespectra. It was found that this ratio was significantly weaker for the positively charged exciton X+ compared to the neutral exciton, X, and the negatively charged exciton, X–. This experimentally obtained result was further supported by computations. Interestingly, the computations revealed that despite that X+ displays the weakest phonon replica among the investigated complexes, it possesses the strongest Fröhlich coupling to phonons in the lattice before recombination. In addition, the spectral broadening of the phonon replicas compared to the main emission is discussed. Also, the origin of the exciton-LO-phonon coupling is concluded to be from the QD itself, based on a comparison between quantum dots with different barriers.In the last paper an additional weak redshifted satellite peak in the recombination spectra is studied. The intensity of this weak satellite peak is correlated to the peak intensity of the positively charged exciton, X+, main emission peak. In addition to this photoluminescence excitation experiments, magnetic field measurement and calculations further support our interpretation that the satellite peak is related to the shake-up of the ground-state hole in the QD that is not involved in the optical recombination. This hole is thus excited by Coulomb interaction to an excited state yielding a photon energy reduced with the difference between the ground-state and the excited state of the spectator hole.