Quantum dot laser | EPFL Graph Search

A quantum dot laser is a semiconductor laser that uses quantum dots as the active laser medium in its light emitting region. Due to the tight confinement of charge carriers in quantum dots, they exhibit an electronic structure similar to atoms. Lasers fabricated from such an active media exhibit device performance that is closer to gas lasers, and avoid some of the negative aspects of device performance associated with traditional semiconductor lasers based on bulk or quantum well active media. Improvements in modulation bandwidth, lasing threshold, relative intensity noise, linewidth enhancement factor and temperature insensitivity have all been observed. The quantum dot active region may also be engineered to operate at different wavelengths by varying dot size and composition. This allows quantum dot lasers to be fabricated to operate at wavelengths previously not possible using semiconductor laser technology. One challenge in the further advances with quantum dot lasers is the pre

Surface emitting Terahertz Photonic Crystal Quantum Cascade Laser realized by Bragg boundary condition

Christopher Bonzon, Zhaolu Diao, Jérôme Faist, Romuald Houdré

We theoretically and experimentally investigate a band edge Photonic Crystal (PhC) Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) operating at 3.1 THz. The surface emission is achieved by using a second-order Bragg grating at the PhC tile boundaries. Highly directional surface emitting far-field patterns are observed.

Ieee2012

Tailored-Potential Pyramidal Quantum Dot Heterostructures

Valentina Troncale

Semiconductor quantum dots are usually compared to artificial atoms, because their electronic structure consists of discrete energy levels as for natural atoms. These artificial systems are integrated in solid materials and can be localized with a spatial precision of the order of nanometers. Besides, they conserve their quantum properties even at quite high temperatures (∼ 10 K). These properties make quantum dots one of the most suitable systems for the realization of quantum devices and computers. However, the energy states and the optical properties of quantum dots are much more complicated than for atoms, because a quantum dot is never an isolated potential well. Instead, its electronic structure depends on the crystallin structure of the semiconductor material and on the Coulomb ion-electron and electron-electron correlations. In particular, the presence of several valence bands and their mixing, induced by quantum confinement, gives rise to novel properties which are still not completely understood and exploited in applications. To get a major advance in this field, a full deterministic control of the spatial shape of the quantum confinement is needed, combined with a deeper understanding of the connections between electronic and optical properties. This thesis work has these two main objectives. We realized and experimentally studied different quantum dot systems, in pyramidal hetero-structures grown with MOCVD techniques. These systems allowed the realization of several different geometries for the carrier confining potential, with a precision in the order of nanometers. The optical characterization has been obtained in particular by means of polarization-resolved microphotoluminescence, magneto-photoluminescence, excitation photoluminescence (PLE), and interferometry techniques. For single quantum dots, we have observed and characterized for the first time new excitonic complexes, arising from excited hole states. This allowed a full caracterizatioon of the valence band hole states in our peculiar system. By means of photon correlation measurements, we have also experimentally demonstrated that, even in presence of a large family of exciton states, these quantum dot systems can emit single photons. We have then realized much more complex quantum dot structures, double dot systems (quantum dot molecules) and a completely new system called Dot-in-Dot (DiD). This latter is composed by a small inner dot surrounded by an electrostatic potential well (which can be considered as an outer elongated dot). Such a composite system is characterized by a strong valence band mixing. This state superposition is however very sensitive to small variations of the confining potential. Therefore the degree of valence band mixing can be easily switched by the introduction of a week external field. Since the valence band mixing determines the polarization properties of the emitted light, the DiD changes the polarization properties of its emission spectrum under the action of an external field. In particular, we have experimentally demonstrated this effect for an external static magnetic field, while we have numerically predicted a very similar effect for a static electric field. In the latter case, the polarization switching is a direct consequence of the quantum confined Stark effect induced in the DiD. Hence the DiD appears to be an ideal candidate for realizing emitters of single photons with tunable and controllable polarization.

EPFL2010

Spectral properties of a symmetric three-dimensional quantum dot with a pair of identical attractive delta-impurities symmetrically situated around the origin

Fabio Rinaldi

In this presentation, we wish to provide an overview of the spectral features for the self-adjoint Hamiltonian of the three-dimensional isotropic harmonic oscillator perturbed by either a single attractive delta-interaction centered at the origin or by a pair of identical attractive delta-interactions symmetrically situated with respect to the origin. Given that such Hamiltonians represent the mathematical model for quantum dots with sharply localized impurities, we cannot help having the renowned article by Bruning, Geyler and Lobanov [1] as our key reference. We shall also compare the spectral features of the aforementioned three-dimensional models with those of the self-adjoint Hamiltonian of the harmonic oscillator perturbed by an attractive delta'-interaction in one dimension, fully investigated in [2, 3], given the existence in both models of the remarkable spectral phenomenon called "level crossing". The rigorous definition of the self-adjoint Hamiltonian for the singular double well model will be provided through the explicit formula for its resolvent (Green's function). Furthermore, by studying in detail the equation determining the ground state energy for the double well model, it will be shown that the concept of "positional disorder", introduced in [1] in the case of a quantum dot with a single delta-impurity, can also be extended to the model with the twin impurities in the sense that the greater the distance between the two impurities is, the less localized the ground state will be. Another noteworthy spectral phenomenon will also be determined; for each value of the distance between the two centers below a certain threshold value, there exists a range of values of the strength of the twin point interactions for which the first excited symmetric bound state is more tightly bound than the lowest antisymmetric bound state. Furthermore, it will be shown that, as the distance between the two impurities shrinks to zero, the 3D-Hamiltonian with the singular double well (requiring renormalization to be defined) does not converge to the one with a single delta-interaction centered at the origin having twice the strength, in contrast to its one-dimensional analog for which no renormalization is required. It is worth stressing that this phenomenon has also been recently observed in the case of another model requiring the renormalization of the coupling constant, namely the one-dimensional Salpeter Hamiltonian perturbed by two twin attractive delta-interactions symmetrically situated at the same distance from the origin.