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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Coherence properties of semiconductor nanostructures

R. Lévy, B. Hönerlage, P. Gilliot

Published Apr 23, 1998• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the coherence times of CuBr nanocrystals (quantum dots) in a borosilicate matrix under resonant excitation. Measurements are performed in two different experiments: Degenerate four-wave mixing with pulses of approximately 100 fs duration and spectral hole burning using a nanosecond excitation. Our results show a dependence of the dephasing times on the excitation intensity, and, when extrapolated to low intensity, a longer coherence time under fs than ns excitation. This result is tentatively explained as being due to spectral diffusion in the case of ns excitation.

DOI
10.1117/12.306173

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We study the coherence times of CuBr nanocrystals (quantum dots) in a borosilicate matrix under resonant excitation. Measurements are performed in two different experiments: Degenerate four-wave mixing with pulses of approximately 100 fs duration and spectral hole burning using a nanosecond excitation. Our results show a dependence of the dephasing times on the excitation intensity, and, when extrapolated to low intensity, a longer coherence time under fs than ns excitation. This result is tentatively explained as being due to spectral diffusion in the case of ns excitation.
We study CuBr nanocrystals embedded in a borosilicate matrix. The excitonic absorption line is strongly inhomogeneously broadened by the size dispersion of the quantum dots. We explore two ways in order to study the dephasing processes of the transition. The homogeneous absorption linewidth is first determined by spectral hole-burning (SHB) measurements, using a nanosecond dye laser excitation. We then perform degenerate four-wave-mixing experiments (FWM), using 100 fs pulses from a frequency-doubled Ti:sapphire laser. Due to the inhomogeneous broadening, we observe a so-called photon-echo signal and we measure its dynamics. From SHB experiments, we obtain homogeneous linewidths larger than 0.3 meV. From the FWM experiment, we obtain values smaller than 0.2 meV. These discrepancies between SHB and FWM measurements can be explained if we take into account the high excitation intensity necessary to induce absorption saturation in SHB experiments. Moreover, during the 20 ns pulses used, spectral diffusion may occur due to interactions between the nanocrystals and their matrix. Spectrally resolved four-wave-mixing experiments (SR-FWM) are also performed. The oscillations with a 250 fs period we observe at short time delays could be interpreted in terms of quantum beats between two-exciton and one-exciton states.
We perform two beam time integrated (TI) degenerate four wave mixing (DFWM) measurements on 8~nm GaAs quantum wells (QW). Pulses from a Ti-Sapphire laser resonantly excite only 1s heavy hole excitons. The power density of the leading pulse (I1) is increased, keeping that of the delayed pulse fixed and relatively small. We measure the TI-DFWM signal at different delays as well as the DFWM spectra at a fixed delay, as I1 is increased. We find that the dephasing rate, after an initial increase with I1, becomes independent of I1 for large I1. The spectrally integrated DFWM signal, which probes the coherent polarization of the resonantly excited QWs, initially increases with I1, reaches a peak and then decreases as 1/(root)I1 at large I1. The results are compared with theoretical models of exciton coherence.
Coherent transient spectroscopy of semiconductor nanostructures has become an active field of research in recent years. Most such experiments are analyzed in terms of a simple two-level model in which the effects of interaction and induced fields are ignored. We discuss two very different cases where inclusion of these generally-neglected effects leads to large and important modification in the temporal response of the system. In the first case, interactions between excitons strongly modify the temporal response of four-wave-mixing (FWM) signals from quantum wells. This is the temporal analog of well-known effects in the spectral domain, such as bleaching of the exciton absorption and bandgap renormalization. In the second case, the shape of a low-intensity pulse is severely distorted after transmission through a typical quantum well sample. Interferometric measurements show that reradiation of induced polarization is responsible for the distortion. The distortion depends strongly on the dephasing time and has important implications for all time-resolved measurements. 1.
We investigate the dephasing times in highly excited CdSe and CdS0.3Se0.7 nanocrystals by spectral hole burning throughout the gain region. The energy dependence of the dephasing time T2 is compared between quantum dots in the strong-confinement regime and bulklike microcrystals. T2 in strongly confined quantum dots remains rather constant, whereas the bulklike sample shows a continuous increase of T2 toward the transparency point. This observation is attributed to the different gain mechanisms in the strong and the weak quantum-confinement regimes.
Excitons, the bound states of an electron and a hole, in semiconductors are interesting objects and they continue to attract attention of researchers from all over the world. Despite intense research on exciton physics over last three-four decades, many interesting phenomena related to the dynamics and the nonlinear optical properties of excitons in semiconductors and their nanostructures in the coherent and incoherent regimes are still to be explored. This thesis presents our effort to study the nonlinear optical properties as well as the exciton dynamics in coherent and incoherent regime in semiconductor nanostructures including GaAs quantum wells (QWs) and InAs quantum dots (QDs). We have set up several time-resolved and steady-state optical spectroscopic measurement techniques in our laboratory to carry out our study on excitons dynamics in semiconductor QWs and QDs. We work out a clear and detailed theory of the pump-probe signal taking account of all aspect of the measurement, namely, the lock-in detection, spectral selection by the monochromator and time-integration at the slow photodetector. We have used the formalism of optical Bloch equations conventionally used to analyse wave mixing experiments. Our analysis puts the pump-probe technique on the same footing as the wave mixing experiments. We show that pumpprobe experiments can be used to study both coherent and incoherent dynamics. We also present a clear physical picture of the measured signal using the Lorentz harmonic oscillator model. We report the investigation of the coherent exciton dephasing dynamics using pumpprobe reflectivity measurement in GaAs QWs for resonant excitation. Two GaAs/AlGaAs QWs with well thicknesses 8 nm and 17.5 nm are used. We found a strong dependence of the dephasing rate of the excitons with increasing exciton density due to exciton-exciton scattering. We found that the exciton dephasing rate of 8 nm QWs at low excitation density and at low lattice temperature is larger than the corresponding dephasing rate of the 17.5 nm QWs, possibly due to larger effect of inhomogeneous broadening. We also report that the dephasing rates for both QWs are linear with the sample temperature below the 30 K. We report the study of ionization equilibrium between the exciton and the electronhole plasma population in the temperature and pressure (excitation density) phase space. Non-resonant excitation of semiconductor creates a nonequilibrium state of electron-hole plasma. We investigate this ionization equilibrium using steady state photoluminescence and time-resolved excitation correlation PL measurements. We present a clear phase diagram (in temperature and carrier density phase space) of this ionization process.A clear density-dependent increase in the ionization ratio is observed and its connection with the Mott transition is discussed. Semiconductor nanocrystals and QDs are another important area of research, mainly due to their huge potential for device application. We present a simple model which combines carrier loss kinetics, detailed balance principle in thermodynamic equilibrium and Pauli exclusion principle to quantitatively explain the observed behaviour of the experimental data.
Correlated electron-hole pairs, or excitons, in semiconductor nanostructures have been studied extensively over the past few decades. The optical response of excitons is complicated due to inhomogeneous broadening, presence of multiple states, and exciton-exciton interactions. In this work we bring new perspectives to exciton physics in semiconductor quantum wells (QWs) through two-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (2DCS).\nThe effect of QW growth direction on the optical properties of excitons is explored by studying (110)-oriented GaAs QWs. The homogeneous and inhomogeneous linewidths of the heavy-hole exciton resonance are measured. By probing the optical nonlinear response for polarization along the in-plane crystal axes [1-10] and [001], we measure different homogeneous linewidths for the two orthogonal directions. This difference is found to be due to anisotropic excitation-induced dephasing, caused by a crystal-axis-dependent absorption coefficient. The extrapolated zero-excitation density homogeneous linewidth exhibits an activation-like temperature dependence.\nSpectral diffusion of excitons in (001)-oriented QWs has been studied. We show that the spectral diffusion characteristics depend strongly on the sample temperature. Spectral diffusion is generally assumed to follow the strong-redistribution approximation, partly because of lack of any evidence to the contrary. We find that this assumption is violated at low sample temperatures for excitons in QWs; high-energy excitons preferentially relax due to a negligible phonon population at low temperatures. The frequency-frequency correlation function is measured through a numerical fitting procedure to quantify spectral diffusion for sample temperatures >20>20>20 K.\nExciton-exciton interactions affect the light-matter interactions in QWs significantly. We present an intuitive and simple model for these interactions by treating excitons as interacting bosons. We show that the polarization-dependent exciton dephasing rate in GaAs quantum wells is due to the bosonic character of excitons. We fit slices from simulated spectra to those from the experimentally measured spectra and show that interference between two different quantum mechanical pathways results in a slower dephasing rate for co-circular and co-linear polarization of optical excitation pulses. This interference does not exist for cross-linearly polarized excitation pulses resulting in a faster dephasing rate. Additionally, we were able to separately quantify inter- and intra-mode interactions between excitons through exciton-density-dependent measurements.