Explanation of unusual photoluminescence behavior from InAs quantum dots with InAlAs capping

Journal article, 2005

The effect of different kinds of cap layers on optical property of InAs quantum dots (QDs) on GaAs (100) substrate was studied. Temperature dependent photoluminescence (PL) indicates that the PL integrated intensity from the ground state of InAs QDs capped with an intermediate InAlAs layer drops very little as compared to QDs capped with a thin InGaAs or GaAs cap layer from 15 K up to room temperature. PL integrated intensity ratio of the first excited to ground states for InAs QDs capped with an intermediate InAlAs layer is unexpectedly decreased with increasing temperature, which are attributed to phonon bottleneck effect. A virtual barrier is proposed to describe this physics process and shows good agreement with experimental results when fitting the curve with the value of the virtual barrier 30 meV.