Spontaneous light emission from fractional-dimensional excitons

We apply the concept of fractional-dimensional excitons to study the process of light emission in quantum confined systems. We focus on a single parameter , known as the degree of dimensionality and which is related to the exciton coherence volume. We compute rates of light emission due to free excitons in GaAs/Al_xGa_1-xAs quantum wells as functions of and link them to experimental observations. The rates are compared with those of quantum well excitons embedded in a microcavity.