Spectral signatures of high-symmetry quantum dots and effects of symmetry breaking

High symmetry epitaxial quantum dots (QDs) with three or more symmetry planes provide a very promising route for the generation of entangled photons for quantum information applications. The great challenge to fabricate nanoscopic high symmetry QDs is further complicated by the lack of structural characterization techniques able to resolve small symmetry breaking. In this work, we present an approach for identifying and analyzing the signatures of symmetry breaking in the optical spectra of QDs. Exciton complexes in InGaAs/AlGaAs QDs grown along the [111]B crystalline axis in inverted tetrahedral pyramids are studied by polarization resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy combined with lattice temperature dependence, excitation power dependence and temporal photon correlation measurements. By combining such a systematic experimental approach with a simple theoretical approach based on a point-group symmetry analysis of the polarized emission patterns of each exciton complex, we demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a strict and coherent identification of all the observable spectral patterns of numerous exciton complexes and a quantitative determination of the fine structure splittings of their quantum states. This analysis is found to be particularly powerful for selecting QDs with the highest degree of symmetry (C-3v and D-3h) for potential applications of these QDs as polarization entangled photon sources. We exhibit the optical spectra when evolving towards asymmetrical QDs, and show the higher sensitivity of certain exciton complexes to symmetry breaking.

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

Novel materials and algorithms for quantum technologies

Francesco Libbi

The enormous advancements in the ability to detect and manipulate single quantum states have lead to the emerging field of quantum technologies. Among these, quantum computation is the most far-reaching and challenging, aiming to solve problems that the classic computers could never address because of the exponential scaling, while quantum sensing exploits the ability to address single quantum states to realize ultra-sensitive and precise detectors. Defect centers in semiconductors play a primary role in these fields. The possibility to store information in the spin of their ground state, manipulate it through microwaves, and read it optically allows to use them as qubits. In addition, the very sharp dependence of their properties on temperature, strain and magnetic fields makes them very promising quantum sensors. In this Thesis we aim at contributing to the progress of quantum technologies both at the hardware and software level. From a hardware point of view, we study a key property of defect centers in semiconductors, the phonon-assisted luminescence, which can be measured to perform the readout of the information stored in a quantum bit, or to detect temperature variations. We predict the luminescence and study the exciton-phonon couplings within a rigorous many-body perturbation theory framework,an analysis that has never been performed for defect centers.In particular, we study the optical emission of the negatively-charged boron vacancy in 2D hexagonal boron nitride, which currently stands out among defect centers in 2D materials thanks to its promise for applications in quantum information and quantum sensing. We show that phonons are responsible for the observed luminescence, which otherwise would be dark due to symmetry. We also show that the symmetry breaking induced by the static Jahn-Teller effect is not able to describe the presence of the experimentally observed peak at 1.5 eV.The knowledge of the coupling between electrons and phonons is fundamental for the accurate prediction of all the features of the photoluminescence spectrum. However, the large number of atoms in a defect supercell hinders the possibility use density functional perturbation theory to study this coupling. In this work we present a finite-differences technique to calculate the electron-phonon matrix elements, which exploits the symmetries of the defect in such a way to use the very same set of displacement needed for the calculation of phonons. The computation of electron-phonon coupling thus becomes a simple post-processing of the finite-differences phonons calculation. On the quantum software side, we propose an improved quantum algorithm to calculate the Green's function through real-time propagation, and use it to compute the retarded Green's function for the 2-, 3- and 4-site Hubbard models. This novel protocol significantly reduces the number of controlled operations when compared to those previously suggested in literature. Such reduction is quite remarkable when considering the 2-site Hubbard model, for which we show that it is possible to obtain the exact time propagation of the

\ket{N\pm 1}

states by exponentiating one single Pauli component of the Hamiltonian, allowing us to perform the calculations on an actual superconducting quantum processor.

EPFL2022