Theory and ab initio calculation of radiative lifetime of excitons in semiconducting carbon nanotubes

We present a theoretical analysis and first-principles calculation of the radiative lifetime of excitons in semiconducting carbon nanotubes. An intrinsic lifetime of the order of 10 ps is computed for the lowest optically active bright excitons. The intrinsic lifetime is, however, a rapid increasing function of the exciton momentum. Moreover, the electronic structure of the nanotubes dictates the existence of dark excitons near in energy to each bright exciton. Both effects strongly influence measured lifetime. Assuming a thermal occupation of bright and dark exciton bands, we find an effective lifetime of the order of 10 ns at room temperature, in good accord with recent experiments.     

Bose-Einstein condensation in semiconductors: the key role of dark excitons

Bose-Einstein condensation in semiconductors is controlled by the nonelementary-boson nature of excitons. Pauli exclusion between the fermionic components of composite excitons produces dramatic exchange couplings between bright and dark states. In microcavities, where bright excitons and photons form polaritons, they force the condensate to be linearly polarized, as observed. In bulk, they also force linear polarization, but of dark states, due to interband Coulomb scatterings. To evidence this dark condensate, indirect processes are thus needed.     

Role of bright and dark excitons in the temperature-dependent photoluminescence of carbon nanotubes

We report studies of the temperature dependence of the photoluminescence efficiency of single walled carbon nanotubes which demonstrate the role of bright and dark excitons. This is determined by the energy splitting of the excitons combined with 1-D excitonic properties. The splitting of the bright and dark singlet exciton states is found to be only a few meV and is very strongly diameter dependent for diameters in the range 0.8-1.2 nm. The luminescence intensities are also found to be strongly enhanced by magnetic fields at low temperatures due to mixing of the exciton states.     

Riccati generalization of self-similar solutions of nonautonomous Gross-Pitaevskii equation

We present a systematic analytical approach to construct a family of self-similar waves, related through a free parameter, in quasi one-dimension Gross-Pitaevskii equation with time-varying parameters. This approach enables us to control the dynamics of dark and bright similaritons, and first- and second- order self-similar rogue waves in Bose-Einstein condensate through the modulation of time dependent trapping potential. The analysis is done for the sech²? type time-varying quadratic trapping potential for two different choices of linear potential.     

From Faraday rotation to “Faraday oscillation”: Coherence effect between real and virtual excitons

This work provides the microscopic mechanisms responsible for circular birefringence changed into linear birefringence when the polarization of the excitons present in a semiconductor sample goes from circular to linear. This change shows up as Faraday rotation turning to “Faraday oscillation”: The probe polarization plane oscillates instead of rotates while the polarization goes from linear to elliptical and linear again. This oscillation, which reduces to zero when the probe polarization is parallel or perpendicular to the exciton polarization, comes from a non trivial coherence effect between real excitons present in the sample and virtual excitons coupled to unabsorbed photons. While Faraday rotation mainly follows from one single carrier exchange between composite excitons in the absence of Coulomb interaction, Faraday oscillation requires two Coulomb interactions plus a double carrier exchange, the virtual excitons coupled to the unabsorbed “in” and “out” photons being made with different electrons and holes, as nicely revealed by Shiva diagrams which visualize the many-body physics taking place in composite-exciton systems.     

Controlled self-similar matter waves in PT-symmetric waveguide

We study the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to a waveguide with parity-time symmetric potential in the presence of quadratic-cubic nonlinearity modelled by Gross-Pitaevskii equation with external source. We employ the self-similar technique to obtain matter wave solutions, such as bright, kink-type, rational dark and Lorentzian-type self-similar waves for this model. The dynamical behavior of self-similar matter waves can be controlled through variation of trapping potential, external source and nature of nonlinearities present in the system.     

光源频谱宽度对Bessel光束亮暗梯度的影响

分析了三种不同频谱宽度的光源(激光、绿光LED和白光LED)产生无衍射贝塞尔(Bessel)光束亮暗环的梯度。分别模拟得到在不同位置的光强截面图,并计算各亮暗环的光强值,引入对比度的计算公式,计算了三种不同频谱宽度的光源产生贝塞尔光束亮暗环的对比度,可以得到频谱宽度越宽的光源产生的贝塞尔光束亮暗环之间的对比度降低,亮暗环强度梯度下降,从而导致囚禁粒子的能力降低。根据三种光源的特性设计了实验装置,并在与理论模拟相应的位置分别拍摄了三种不同频谱宽度光源产生的无衍射光斑图。对实验中拍摄到的光斑图进行对比度计算,可以得知频谱宽度越宽的光源产生的无衍射光束,其截面光斑亮暗环的对比度降低,亮暗环强度梯度降低,囚禁粒子能力下降,理论和实验相吻合。     

The Influence of Surface Trapping and Dark States on the Fluorescence Emission Efficiency and Lifetime of CdSe and CdSe/ZnS Quantum Dots

To investigate the influence of surface trapping and dark states on CdSe and CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (QDs), we studied the absorption, fluorescence intensity and lifetime by using one-and two-photon excitation, respectively. Experimental results show that both one- and two-photon fluorescence emission efficiencies of the QDs enhance greatly and the lifetime increase after capping CdSe with ZnS due to the effective surface passivation. The lifetime of one-photon fluorescence of CdSe and CdSe/ZnS QDs increase with increasing emission wavelength in a supralinear way, which is attributed to the energy transfer of dark excitons. On the contrary, the lifetime of two-photon fluorescence of bare and core-shell QDs decrease with increasing emission wavelength, and this indicates that the surface trapping is the dominant decay mechanism in this case.     

Radiative dark–bright instability and the critical Casimir effect in DQW exciton condensates

It is already well known that radiative interband interaction in the excitonic normal liquid in semiconducting double quantum wells is responsible for a negligible splitting between the energies of the dark and bright excitons enabling us to consider a four fold spin degeneracy. This has also lead many workers to naively consider the same degeneracy in studying the condensate. On the other hand, the non-perturbative aspects of this interaction in the condensed phase, e.g. its consequences on the order parameter and the dark–bright mixture in the ground state have not been explored. In this work, we demonstrate that the ground state concentrations of the dark and the bright exciton condensates are dramatically different beyond a sharp interband coupling threshold where the contribution of the bright component in the ground state vanishes. This shows that the effect of the radiative interband interaction on the condensate is nonperturbative.We also observe in the free energy a discontinuous derivative with respect to the layer separation at the entrance to the condensed phase, indicating a strong critical Casimir force. An estimate of its strength shows that it is measurable. Measuring the Casimir force is challenging, but at the same time it has a conclusive power about the presence of the long sought for condensed phase.     

Dynamics of matter-wave solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates with time-dependent scattering length and complex potentials

We investigate the dynamics of matter-wave solitons in the one-dimensional (1-D)Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation describing Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) withtime-dependent scattering length in varying trapping potentials with feeding/loss term. Byperforming a modified lens-type transformation, we reduce the GP equation into a classicalnonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation with distributed coefficients and find its integrablecondition. Under the integrable condition, we apply the generalized Jacobian ellipticfunction method (GJEFM) and present exact analytical solutions which describe thepropagation of a bright and dark solitons in BECs. Their stability is examined usinganalytic method. The obtained exact solutions show that the amplitude of bright and darksolitons depends on the scattering length, while their motion and the total number of BECatoms depend on the external trapping potential. Our results also shown that the loss ofatoms can dominate the aggregation of atoms by the attractive interaction, and thus thepeak density can decrease in time despite that the strength of the attractive interactionis increased.     

Spin Physics of Excitons in Colloidal Nanocrystals

We present a review of spin-dependent properties of excitons in semiconductor colloidal nanocrystals. The photoluminescences (PL) properties of neutral and charged excitons (trions) are compared. The mechanisms and the polarization of radiative recombination of a “dark” (spin-forbidden) exciton that determines the low-temperature PL of colloidal nanocrystals are discussed in detail. The radiative recombination of a dark exciton becomes possible as a result of simultaneous flips of the surface spin and electron spin in a dark exciton that leads to admixture of bright exciton states. This recombination mechanism is effective in the case of a disordered state of the spin system and is suppressed if the polaron ferromagnetic state forms. The conditions and various mechanisms of formation of the spin polaron state and possibilities of its experimental detection are discussed. The experimental and theoretical studies of magnetic field-induced circular polarization of PL in ensembles of colloidal nanocrystals are reviewed.     

Bose-einstein condensation of exciton polaritons in high-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Q</Emphasis> planar microcavities with GaAs quantum wells

Condensation of exciton polaritons in planar microcavities with GaAs/AlAs quantum wells in the active area has been studied. It has been found that an increase in the lifetime of polaritons up to ∼10–15 ps when the Q factor of a microcavity exceeds 7000 makes it possible to detect Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons with a dominant (>90%) photon component. Condensation occurs under thermodynamically nonequilibrium conditions in lateral traps with diameters ∼10 μm formed due to long-range fluctuations of the polariton potential. The violet shift of the polariton emission line at the condensation threshold significantly exceeds the energy of the repulsive interaction between polaritons in the condensate. It has been shown that the shift is mainly due to a decrease in the oscillator strength of bright excitons in lateral traps, caused by the localization of photoexcited long-living dark excitons.     

Dark-bright mixing of interband transitions in symmetric semiconductor quantum dots

In photoluminescence spectra of symmetric [111] grown GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots in longitudinal magnetic fields applied along the growth axis, we observe in addition to the expected bright states also nominally dark transitions for both charged and neutral excitons. We uncover a strongly nonmonotonic, sign-changing field dependence of the bright neutral exciton splitting resulting from the interplay between exchange and Zeeman effects. Our theory shows quantitatively that these surprising experimental results are due to magnetic-field-induced ±3/2 heavy-hole mixing, an inherent property of systems with C(3v) point-group symmetry.     

Counterpropagating spatial Kerr soliton in reflection gratings

We analytically predict the existence of both spatial bright and dark counterpropagating solitons in a reflection grating in the presence of the Kerr nonlinearity. The basic trapping mechanism consists of a twofold balance where diffraction is compensated by self-focusing and reflection is altered by the nonlinear-induced interferometric grating. We find that, whenever the spectral soliton profile lies within the grating stop band, bright and dark solitons exist only if the mutual phase of the counterpropagating solitons is pi or 0, respectively.     

Achieving ultracold Bose-Fermi mixture of 87Rb and 40K with dual dark magnetic-optical-trap

We demonstrate that dual dark magnetic-optical-traps (MOTs) have great importance in the two-species ⁸⁷Rb and ⁴⁰K mixture compared with dual bright MOTs. The dark MOT has a little improvement in the trapping of single-species ⁸⁷Rb or ⁴⁰K gases compared with bright MOT. For the case of loading two-species ⁸⁷Rb and ⁴⁰K simultaneously, the improvement of ⁴⁰K in the dual dark MOTs is mainly from the reduction of light-assisted collision losses. The dual dark MOTs employ a pair of conical lenses to produce the hollow beam for repump laser with high efficiency. The number and density of ⁸⁷Rb and ⁴⁰K atoms after evaporative cooling in the hybrid magnetic trap with dark MOT loading are compared with those in bright MOT. The atoms with large number and high density make it easier to realize the quantum degenerate of Bose-Fermi mixture.     

Oscillation properties of matter-wave bright solitons in harmonic potentials

We investigate the oscillation periods of bright soliton pair or vector bright soliton pair in harmonic potentials. We demonstrate that periods of low-speed solitons are greatly affected by the position shift during their collisions. The modified oscillation periods are described by defining a characterized speed, with the aid of asymptotic analysis on related exact analytic soliton solutions in integrable cases. The oscillation period can be used to distinguish the inter- and intra-species interactions between solitons. However, a bright soliton cannot oscillate in a harmonic trap, when it is coupled with a dark soliton (without any trapping potentials). Interestingly, it can oscillate in an anti-harmonic potential, and the oscillation behavior is explained by a quasi-particle theory. The modified period of two dark-bright solitons can be also described well by the characterized speed. These results address well the effects of position shift during soliton collision, which provides an important supplement for previous studies without considering phase shift effects.     

Magneto optics of single photons emitted from single InAs/GaAs self-assembled quantum dots in a planar microcavity

We fully characterize the fine spectral structure of neutral and negatively charged single microcavity quantum dot excitons, using polarization-sensitive magneto-photoluminescence spectroscopy. We show that the microcavity allows the simultaneous detection of both the bright and dark excitons using Faraday configuration. Thus, we were able to fully determine the fine structure and the g-factors of the neutral and negatively charged single exciton states within the same single quantum dot. Our measurements are in excellent agreement with novel, many carrier model calculations, which take into account Coulomb and exchange interactions among all the confined e–h pair states.     

Temperature dependence of radiative recombination in CdSe quantum dots with enhanced confinement

We studied in details the recombination dynamics and its temperature dependence in epitaxially grown neutral CdSe/ZnSSe quantum dots with additional wide-band gap MgS barriers. Such design allows to preserve a very high quantum yield and track the radiative recombination dynamics up to room temperature. A fast initial decay of ∼0.6 ns followed by a slow decay with a time constant ∼30–50 ns is observed at low temperature T < 50 K. The fast decay gradually disappears with increasing temperature while the slow decay shortens and above 100 K predominantly a single-exponential decay is observed with a time constant ∼1.3 ns, which is weekly temperature dependent up to 300 K. To explain the experimental findings, a two-level model which includes bright and dark exciton states and a temperature dependent spin-flip between them is considered. According to the model, it is a thermal activation of the dark exciton to the bright state and its consequent radiative recombination that results in the long decay tail at low temperature. The doubling of the decay time at high temperatures manifests a thermal equilibrium between the dark and bright excitons.     

空间散斑场捕获大量吸光性颗粒及其红外显微观测

光镊技术被广泛应用于捕获和操纵微纳米尺寸颗粒,主要包括捕获水中透明性颗粒和空气中吸光性颗粒两种类型.本文用激光束照射毛玻璃散射片,透射光经透镜会聚后在透镜的像平面附近产生了主观散斑场.该散斑场为空间分布,包含大量的亮斑和暗斑.大量由亮斑包围的暗斑如同一个个空间能量陷阱,被用来捕获大量的吸光性墨粉颗粒,被捕获颗粒的尺寸约2—8μm,密度约1—2 g/cm3.采用红外显微镜拍摄到空间散斑场捕获颗粒的红外像,红外图像显示被捕获颗粒吸光后温度升高,证实了空间散斑场捕获吸光性颗粒的机理为光泳力原理.     

具有三体作用的玻色-爱因斯坦凝聚暗孤子的演化

运用变分法研究了具有三体作用的玻色-爱因斯坦凝聚暗孤子的演化特性,分析了调谐囚禁电势对暗孤子运动的影响.结果表明,囚禁在调谐势阱中的暗孤子将振动,势阱强度和三体作用的符号影响了暗孤子的演化,并改变了BEC系统的振动特性.