Supercoupling between heavy-hole and light-hole states in self-assembled quantum dots

Abstract

Spintronics, quantum computing and quantum communication science utilizing cubic semiconductors rely largely on the properties of the hole states, composed of light and heavy hole wavefunction components. The admixture of light-hole (LH) into ground hole state predominately by the heavy hole (HH) would induce unique features of LH in optical transitions, spin relaxation, and spin polarization. We point to an unexpected source of HH-LH mixing in quantum dots, arguing that in contrast with current models the mixing does not reflect the strain between the dot and its matrix and does not scale inversely with the energy splitting between the bulk HH and LH states. Instead, we show via atomistic pseudopotential calculations on a range of strained and unstrained dots of different symmetries that the HH-LH mixing is enabled by the presence in the QD of a dense ladder of intermediate states between the HH and LH states which amplifies and propagates this interaction and leads to "supercoupling" (analogous to super-exchange in magnetism). This explains a number of outstanding puzzles regarding the surprising large coupling seen in unstrained QD (GaAs/AlAs) of ideal shapes and the surprising fact that in strained QD (InAs/GaAs) the coupling is very strong despite the fact that the 12-fold increase in bulk HH-LH splitting overrides the ~4 fold enhancement of the coupling matrix element by strain in comparison with unstrained GaAs QDs.

20 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Electric-field-induced coherent coupling of the exciton states in a single quantum dot
• Hole - Nuclear Spin Interaction in Quantum Dots
• Hybridization and spin decoherence in heavy-hole quantum dots
• Impact of heavy hole-light hole coupling on optical selection rules in GaAs quantum dots
• Polarization properties of excitonic qu-bits in single self-assembled quantum dots
• Optical alignment and polarization conversion of neutral exciton spin in individual InAs/GaAs quantum dots

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