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© 2015 Optical Society of America. The development of a thresholdless laser operating above room temperature (RT) is key for the future replacement of electronics with photonic integrated circuits, enabling an increase of several orders of magnitude in computing speeds. Recently, thresholdless lasing characteristics at low temperature (4 K) have been demonstrated. However, for practical applications, RT laser emission becomes necessary. Here we report experimental evidence that is compatible with a laser based on InAsSb quantum dots embedded in a photonic-crystal microcavity that exhibits an ultralow-power threshold (860 nW) and high efficiency (ß = 0.85), thus operating in the near-thresholdless regime at RT in the 1.3 µm spectral window. The results open up a wide range of opportunities for RT applications of ultralow threshold lasers, such as integrated photonic circuitry or high sensitivity biosensors.

The multiexciton properties of extrinsic centers from AlGaAs layers on Ge and Si substrates are addressed. The two photon cascade is found both in steady state and in time resolved experiments. Polarization analysis of the photoluminescence provides clearcut attribution to neutral biexciton complexes. Our findings demonstrate the prospect of exploiting extrinsic centers for generating entangled photon pairs on a Si based device. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.

We show that the epitaxial growth of height-controlled GaAs quantum dots, leading to the reduction of the inhomogeneous emission bandwidth, produces individual nanostructures of peculiar morphology. Besides the height controlled quantum dots, we observe nanodisks formation. Exploiting time resolved and spatially resolved photoluminescence we establish the decoupling between quantum dots and nanodisks and demonstrate the high optical properties of the individual quantum dots, despite the processing steps needed for height control. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.

The Purcell effect dependence on the excitation power is studied in photonic crystal microcavity lasers embedding InAs/InP quantum wires. In the case of non-lasing modes, the Purcell effect has low dependence on the optical pumping, attributable to an exciton dynamics combining free and localized excitons. In the case of lasing modes, the influence of the stimulated emission makes ambiguous the determination of the Purcell factor. We have found that this ambiguity can be avoided by measuring the dependence of the decay time on the excitation power. These results provide insights in the determination of the Purcell factor in microcavity lasers. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.

We show that the epitaxial growth of thin layers of AlGaAs on Ge and Si substrates allows to obtain single photon sources by exploiting the sparse and unintentional contamination with acceptors of the AlGaAs. Very bright and sharp single photoluminescence lines are observed in confocal microscopy. These lines behave very much as single excitons in quantum dots, but their implementation is by far much easier, since it does not require 3D nucleation. The photon antibunching is demonstrated by time resolved Hanbury Brown and Twiss measurements

We have investigated the temperature dependent recombination dynamics in two bimodally distributed InAs self assembled quantum dots samples. A rate equations model has been implemented to investigate the thermally activated carrier escape mechanism which changes from exciton-like to uncorrelated electron and hole pairs as the quantum dot size varies. For the smaller dots, we find a hot exciton thermal escape process. We evaluated the thermal transfer process between quantum dots by the quantum dot density and carrier escape properties of both samples. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

The spontaneous emission rate and Purcell factor of selfassembled quantum wires embedded in photonic crystal micro-cavities aremeasured at 80 K by using micro- photoluminescence, under transient and steady state excitation conditions. The Purcell factors fall in the range 1.1 - 2 despite the theoretical prediction of ?15.5 for the figure of merit. We explain this difference by introducing a polarization dependence on the cavity orientation, parallel or perpendicular with respect to the wire axis, plus spectral and spatial detuning factors for the emitters and the cavitymodes, taking in account the finite size of the quantum wires. © 2012 Optical Society of America.

We investigate the electronic and optical properties of InAs double quantum dots grown on GaAs (001) and laterally aligned along the [110] crystal direction. The emission spectrum has been investigated as a function of a lateral electric field applied along the quantum dot pair mutual axis. The number of confined electrons can be controlled with the external bias, leading to sharp energy shifts which we use to identify the emission from neutral and charged exciton complexes. Quantum tunneling of these electrons is proposed to explain the reversed ordering of the trion emission lines as compared to that of excitons in our system.

We model the time-resolved and time-integrated photoluminescence of a single InAs/GaAs quantum dot (QD) using a random population description. We reproduce the joint power dependence of the single QD exciton complexes(neutral exciton, neutral biexciton and charged trions). We use the model to investigate the selective optical pumping phenomenon, a predominance of the negative trion observed when the optical excitation is resonant to a nonintentional impurity level. Our experiments and simulations determine that the negative charge confined in the QD after exciting resonance to the impurity level escapes in 10 ns.

We have studied the lateral coupling between InAs/GaAs quantum dot pairs embedded in a field-effect structure. Quantum dot pairs and molecules have been identified by the correlated evolution of the Coulomb blockade features of each QD in the pair. This behaviour is largely distorted in the presence of resonant coupling states in the QD molecule. Single QD voltage evolution shows a crossover in the lineshape profile, which is associated to Spectral Diffusion processes due to residual charged environment.

The emission properties of lateral and vertical QD pairs grown on GaAs nanoholes are investigated. Vertical QD pairs with different size asymmetry have been fabricated controlling the bottom QD size independently of the areal density. The emission of individual pairs is dominated by spectral diffusion effects and charge instabilities induced by the local charge environment. Lateral QD pairs have been fabricated on GaAs nanoholes and studied as a function of an electric field applied in the growth plane.

We present a fabrication method to produce site-controlled and regularly spaced InAs/GaAs quantum dots for applications in quantum optical information devices. The high selectivity of our epitaxial regrowth procedure can be used to allocate the quantum dots only in positions predefined by ex-situ local oxidation atomic force nanolithography. The quantum dots obtained following this fabrication process present a high optical quality which we have evaluated by microphotoluminescence and photon correlation experiments.

We have investigated the selective optical pumping of charged excitonic species in a sample containing quantum dots of different sizes and low areal density by photoluminescence and excitation of the photoluminescence microspectroscopy. We study the selective optical excitation of negatively charged excitons as an alternative to commonly used electrical methods. We demonstrate that under resonant excitation in impurity related bands, the selective pumping efficiency can be as high as 85% in small quantum dots having one electron shell and emitting at around 930 nm, and around 65% in big quantum dots having four electron shells and emitting at 1160 nm. © IOP Publishing Ltd.

Continuous wave- and time-resolved micro-photoluminescence spectroscopy has been performed on single InAs self-assembled quantum dots grown on GaAs. The presence of residual impurities (donors and acceptors) in samples with low dot density opens the possibility to switch from trion to neutral exciton states inside quantum dots by selective optical pumping. We propose a microstate model to describe the recombination dynamics of all the excitonic especies (neutral exciton, positive/negative trion and biexciton) under the considered optical pumping conditions when increasing the excitation power. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We study the metal-insulator transition in individual self-assembled quantum wires and report optical evidence of metallic liquid condensation at low temperatures. First, we observe that the temperature and power dependence of the single nanowire photoluminescence follow the evolution expected for an electron-hole liquid in one dimension. Second, we find novel spectral features that suggest that in this situation the expanding liquid condensate compresses the exciton gas in real space. Finally, we estimate the critical density and critical temperature of the phase transition diagram at nc~1×105 cm-1 and Tc~35 K, respectively.