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In a recent publication [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 227402 (2006), cond-mat/0611411], it has been demonstrated numerically that a long-range disorder potential in semiconductor quantum wells can be reconstructed reliably via single-photon interferometry of spontaneously emitted light. In the present paper, a simplified analytical model of independent two-level systems is presented in order to study the reconstruction procedure in more detail. With the help of this model, the measured photon correlations can be calculated analytically and the influence of parameters such as the disorder length scale, the wavelength of the used light, or the spotsize can be investigated systematically. Furthermore, the relation between the proposed angle-resolved single-photon correlations and the disorder potential can be understood and the measured signal is expected to be closely related to the characteristic strength and length scale of the disorder., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, submitted to the special issue of the Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics (JMSE), presented at the ICOOPMA 2007 conference

The method of angular photonic correlations of spontaneous emission is introduced as an experimental, purely optical scheme to characterize disorder in semiconductor nanostructures. The theoretical expression for the angular correlations is derived and numerically evaluated for a model system. The results demonstrate how the proposed experimental method yields direct information about the spatial distribution of the relevant states and thus on the disorder present in the system., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted for PRL

A fully microscopic theory for the spontaneous emission from semiconductors is discussed. The theory is evaluated for a quantum-well system and the role of excitonic and unbound electron-hole-pair contributions to the emission is analyzed. Simplifying aproximations to the full theory and their range of validity are discussed. Numerical solutions are presented for experimentally relevant situations and it is shown that a detailed analysis of measured spectra requires the knowledge of both absorption and emission under identical conditions., Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures

A microscopic theory for the luminescence of ordered semiconductors is modified to describe photoluminescence of strongly disordered semiconductors. The approach includes both diagonal disorder and the many-body Coulomb interaction. As a case study, the light emission of a correlated plasma is investigated numerically for a one-dimensional two-band tight-binding model. The band structure of the underlying ordered system is assumed to correspond to either a direct or an indirect semiconductor. In particular, luminescence and absorption spectra are computed for various levels of disorder and sample temperature to determine thermodynamic relations, the Stokes shift, and the radiative lifetime distribution., Comment: 35 pages, 14 figures

The dynamics of exciton and electron-hole plasma populations is studied via time-resolved photoluminescence after nonresonant excitation. By comparing the peak emission at the exciton resonance with the emission of the continuum, it is possible to experimentally identify regimes where the emission originates predominantly from exciton and/or plasma populations. The results are supported by a microscopic theory which allows one to extract the fraction of bright excitons as a function of time., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

Luminescence as a mechanism for terahertz emission from femtosecond laser-induced plasmas is studied. By using a fully microscopic theory, Coulomb scattering between electrons and ions is shown to lead to luminescence even for a spatially homogeneous plasma. The spectral features introduced by the rod geometry of laser-induced plasma channels in air are discussed on the basis of a generalized mode-function analysis., Comment: 4 pages with 2 figuress

Time-resolved photoluminescence spectra after nonresonant excitation show a distinct 1s resonance, independent of the existence of bound excitons. A microscopic analysis identifies excitonic and electron-hole plasma contributions. For low temperatures and low densities the excitonic emission is extremely sensitive to even minute optically active exciton populations making it possible to extract a phase diagram for incoherent excitonic populations., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

The induced terahertz response of semiconductor systems is investigated with a microscopic theory. In agreement with recent terahertz experiments, the developed theory fully explains the ultrafast build up of the plasmon resonance and the slow formation of incoherent excitonic populations. For incoherent conditions, it is shown that a terahertz field exclusively probes the correlated electron-hole pairs via a symmetry breaking between many-body correlations with even and odd functional form., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

A microscopic theory is developed to analyze the dynamics of exciton formation out of incoherent carriers in semiconductor heterostructures. The carrier Coulomb and phonon interaction is included consistently. A cluster expansion method is used to systematically truncate the hierarchy problem. By including all correlations up to the four-point (i.e. two-particle) level, the fundamental fermionic substructure of excitons is fully included. The analysis shows that the exciton formation is an intricate process where Coulomb correlations rapidly build up on a picosecond time scale while phonon dynamics leads to true exciton formation on a slow nanosecond time scale., Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures