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Physical Review B

Control of excitonic population inversion in a coupled semiconductor quantum dot–metal nanoparticle system

Emmanuel Paspalakis, Sofia Evangelou, Andreas Terzis

Published Jun 4, 2013• 72 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the potential for controlled population inversion in a coupled system comprised of a semiconductor quantum dot and a metal nanoparticle. We show that the widely used method of population inversion by a $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulse can be modified for small interparticle distances. This modification depends strongly on the pulse duration. We also present analytical solutions of the nonlinear density matrix equations, for specific pulse envelopes, which lead to efficient excitonic population inversion in the quantum dot for several distances between the semiconductor quantum dot and the metal nanoparticle.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.87.235302

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We study the potential for controlled population inversion in a coupled system comprised of a semiconductor quantum dot and a metal nanoparticle. We show that the widely used method of population inversion by a \ensuremathπ\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremathπ pulse can be modified for small interparticle distances. This modification depends strongly on the pulse duration. We also present analytical solutions of the nonlinear density matrix equations, for specific pulse envelopes, which lead to efficient excitonic population inversion in the quantum dot for several distances between the semiconductor quantum dot and the metal nanoparticle.
We study the efficient preparation of the exciton state in a hybrid nanostructure composed by a semiconductor quantum dot and a metallic nanoparticle, when starting from the ground state, using pulses derived with the method of shortcuts to adiabaticity. We show with numerical simulations that high levels of exciton population can be obtained for a wide range of interparticle distances and for short pulse durations. This behavior appears also to be robust against small positioning errors of the system. The fidelity of the population inversion degrades for smaller distances and longer pulses, as the nonlinear terms in the equations, expressing the quantum dot–metal nanoparticle interaction, become stronger and affect the evolution for longer times. The present work is expected to help schemes toward the generation of single photons on demand or ultrafast nanoswitches, where the controlled population inversion in semiconductor quantum dots coupled to metal nanoparticles is an important task.
We study ultrafast excitonic population inversion resulting from the interaction of a semiconductor quantum dot (SQD) with localized surface plasmons. The plasmonic enhanced fields are generated when a metallic nanoparticle (MNP) is subject to a nonlinear chirped few-cycle pulse train. By numerically solving the time-dependent Bloch equations beyond the rotating-wave approximation, we show that the complete population inversion can be achieved for small interparticle distance and the dynamic in population inversion exhibits a steplike transition between absorption and amplifying. This phenomenon can be exploited as an all-optical ultrafast switching device. Moreover, the final state of population inversion is shown to be modified significantly with the interparticle distances, which is not only robust against the variation of probe pulse parameters but also suggests a straightforward method for measuring the interparticle distances via probing the final populations.
We consider a hybrid nanostructure composed of a semiconductor quantum dot placed near a spherical metallic nanoparticle, and study the effect of the nanoparticle on the population transferral from the ground to the biexciton state of the quantum dot, when using linearly chirped Gaussian pulses. For various values of the system parameters (biexciton energy shift, pulse area and chirp, interparticle distance), we calculate the final population of the biexciton state by performing numerical simulations of the non-linear density matrix equations which describe the coupled system, as well as its interaction with the applied electromagnetic field. We find that for relatively large values of the biexciton energy shift and not very small interparticle distances, the presence of the nanoparticle improves the biexciton state preparation, since it effectively increases the area of the applied pulse. For smaller biexciton energy shifts and smaller distances between the quantum dot and the nanoparticle, the performance is, in general, degraded. However, even in these cases we can still find ranges of parameter values where the population transfer to the biexciton state is accomplished with high fidelity, when using linearly chirped Gaussian pulses. We anticipate that our results may be exploited for the implementation of novel nanoscale photonic devices or future quantum technologies.
We study the optical response of a coupled asymmetric semiconductor quantum dot-spherical metal nanoparticle structure. The asymmetric quantum dot has permanent electric dipole moments that also interact with light. We derive the density matrix equations for the system including the modification of the electric field and the exciton-plasmon coupling. We emphasize on the effects of the nonlinear optical rectification and controlled optical bistability and analyze these phenomena for different values of the light intensity and different distances between the quantum dot and the metal nanoparticle. We show that when the system is set in a situation where optical bistability can be produced, the optical rectification of the hybrid system is bivalued. We also analyze the slow-down to reach the steady state when the system is driven close and far from the turning points.
We study optical effects in a hybrid system composed of a semiconductor quantum dot and a spherical metal nanoparticle that interacts with a weak probe electromagnetic field. We use modified nonlinear density matrix equations for the description of the optical properties of the system and obtain a closed-form expression for the linear susceptibilities of the quantum dot, the metal nanoparticle, and the total system. We then investigate the dependence of the susceptibility on the interparticle distance as well as on the material parameters of the hybrid system. We find that the susceptibility of the quantum dot exhibits optical transparency for specific frequencies. In addition, we show that there is a range of frequencies of the applied field for which the susceptibility of the semiconductor quantum dot leads to gain. This suggests that in such a hybrid system quantum coherence can reverse the course of energy transfer, allowing flow of energy from the metallic nanoparticle to the quantum dot. We also explore the susceptibility of the metal nanoparticle and show that it is strongly influenced by the presence of the quantum dot.
In the present work, we investigate the modified nonlinear pump-probe optical properties due to the excitonic–plasmonic interaction of a double semiconductor quantum dot (SQD) molecule coupled to a metal nanoparticle (MNP). More specifically, we study the absorption and the dispersion spectra of a weak electromagnetic field in a hybrid structure with two counterparts, a molecule of two coupled SQDs, and a spherical MNP driven by a field of high intensity. We solve the relevant density matrix equations, calculate the first-order optical susceptibility of the probe field in the strong pumping regime, and investigate the way in which the distance between the two counterparts modifies the optical response, for a variety of values of the physical constants of the system, including the pump-field detuning, the tunnelling rate, and the energy separation gap associated with the excited states of the coupled SQDs.