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Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters

Collective behavior of interwell excitons in GaAs/AlGaAs double quantum wells

A. V. Larionov, Vladislav B. Timofeev, J. M. Hvam, C. Soerensen

Published Feb 1, 2000• 21 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Photoluminescence spectra of interwell excitons in double GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells (n-i-n structures) have been investigated (an interwell exciton in these systems is an electron-hole pair spatially separated by a narrow AlAs barrier). Under resonance excitation by circularly polarized light, the luminescence line of interwell excitons exhibits a significant narrowing and a drastic increase in the degree of circular polarization of photoluminescence with increasing exciton concentration. It is found that the radiative recombination rate significantly increases under these conditions. This phenomenon is observed at temperatures lower than the critical point and can be interpreted in terms of the collective behavior of interwell excitons.

DOI
10.1134/1.568294

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•Jun 1, 1998•0 citations
Photoluminescence spectra of interwell excitons in double GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells (n-i-n structures) have been investigated (an interwell exciton in these systems is an electron-hole pair spatially separated by a narrow AlAs barrier). Under resonance excitation by circularly polarized light, the luminescence line of interwell excitons exhibits a significant narrowing and a drastic increase in the degree of circular polarization of photoluminescence with increasing exciton concentration. It is found that the radiative recombination rate significantly increases under these conditions. This phenomenon is observed at temperatures lower than the critical point and can be interpreted in terms of the collective behavior of interwell excitons.
The time evolution and kinetics of photoluminescence (PL) spectra of interwell excitons in double GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells ( n-i-n structures) have been investigated under the pulse resonance excitation of intrawell 1sHH excitons using a pulsed tunable laser. It is found that the collective exciton phase arises with a time delay relative to the exciting pulse (several nanoseconds), which is due to density and temperature relaxation to the equilibrium values. The origination of the collective phase of interwell excitons is accompanied by a strong narrowing of the corresponding photoluminescence line (the line width is about 1.1 meV), a superlinear rise in its intensity, a long time in the change of the degree of circular polarization, a displacement of the PL spectrum toward lower energies (about 1.5 meV) in accordance with the filling of the lowest state with the exciton Bose condensate, and a significant increase in the radiative decay rate of the condensed phase. The collective exciton phase arises at temperatures T <6 K and interwell exciton densities n =3×10 10 cm −2 . Coherent properties of the collective phase of interwell excitons and experimental manifestations of this coherence are discussed.
In this work we experimentally study dynamics of the heavy-hole and light-hole exciton states in a quantum well under coherent excitation of both excitonic resonances using co- and cross-linear and circular polarizations of pump and probe beams. Oscillations of basic parameters of excitonic resonances are observed. Their dependence on the polarization of the pump and probe beams is used to determine the structure of states of the heavy-hole and light-hole excitons by means of theoretical modelling of experimental data. Keywords: quantum well, excitons, quantum beats, light-hole exciton, heavy-hole exciton.
Time- and spectrally resolved reflectivity measurements on multiple-quantum-well structures excited by ultrashort laser pulses are presented. In Bragg structures, where the interwell distance amounts to half the optical wavelength at the exciton resonance, superradiant coupling of the polarization dynamics within different quantum wells leads to an enhancement of the reflectivity strength and linewidth. We show that the superradiance is not limited to the heavy-hole exciton but can be observed even on excited and light-hole exciton states as well as on correlated electron-hole pair states. These coupling effects grow with the number of quantum wells. For our samples containing 60 and 30 quantum wells, pronounced superradiant enhanced reflectivity is present even at high excitation intensities and high temperatures, showing the insensitivity of radiative coupling with respect to incoherent scattering processes. Our findings are in good agreement with solutions of the semiconductor Maxwell-Bloch equations.
We demonstrate the presence of strong exciton-exciton correlations in GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum wells by using the polarization selection rules for four-wave mixing and a test that was originally designed to distinguish between quantum beats and polarization interference. We show that, when the four-wave-mixing signal is produced by two pulses that have the same circular polarization, dynamic beating behavior is observed at the heavy-hole-light-hole frequency that provides evidence of Coulomb-induced correlations that go beyond those expected from the semiconductor Bloch equations in the Hartree-Fock approximation and beyond the local field corrections used in simple phenomenological models. Moreover, this behavior cannot be explained by invoking biexcitonic effects. We demonstrate that this dynamic excitonic coupling can be explained in terms of a competition between quantum-beat-like and polarization-interference-like behavior, and we show that such behavior can be used to place quantitative limits on the coupling strength. In addition, we use a simple phenomenological model to show that excitation-induced-dephasing can produce such correlations.
The optical response of radiatively coupled semiconductor multiple-quantum-well structures is investigated theoretically. It is shown that the transverse optical field leads to a coupling of exciton states within each well which causes a radiative decay and a mixing of excitonic resonances. Simultaneously, the field-induced long-ranged coupling between different wells leads to collective effects that are very sensitive to the detailed geometry of the structure. For a quantum-well spacing equal to an integer multiple of half the optical wavelength inside the medium, it is predicted that the collective effects cause a stimulated decay of electronic excitations that should be observable in either transmission or reflection geometry. On the other hand, in a quarter wavelength structure, the light-induced coupling causes an interwell energy transport and a splitting of the excitonic resonances, that should be observable as quantum beats in the time-resolved transmitted or reflected signal.