Absorption and photoluminescence studies of the temperature dependence of exciton life time in lattice-matched and strained quantum well systems

We present systematic studies of the temperature dependence of linewidths and lifetimes of excitonic transitions in quantum wells grown by molecular beam epitaxy using both photoluminescence(PL) and optical absorption. The temperature ranged from 6K to room temperature. Samples under investigation were lattice-matched GaAs/AlGaAs and InGaAs/InAlAs, and strained InGaAs/GaAs and InGaAs/AlGaAs quantum wellssystems. In addition, the effects of well-size variations in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells were measured and analyzed. In all cases we were able to observe the excitonic transitions up to room temperature. By a careful fitting of the experimental data we separated the exciton transitions from band-to-band transitions. By deconvoluting the excitonic transitions we obtained the homogeneous and inhomogeneous linewidths. The homogeneous linewidths were used to calculate the exciton lifetimes as a function of temperature using the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. We found the lifetime decreases significantly with temperature and increases with increasing well size. These results are interpreted in terms of the exciton-phonon interaction and are expected to be very useful for the design of semiconductor optical devices operating at different temperatures.