John Shumway

Biexciton recombination rates in self-assembled quantum dots

The radiative recombination rates of interacting electron-hole pairs in a quantum dot are strongly affected by quantum correlations among electrons and holes in the dot. Recent measurements of the biexciton recombination rate in single self-assembled quantum dots have found values spanning from two times the single exciton recombination rate to values well below the exciton decay rate. In this paper, a Feynman path-integral formulation is developed to calculate recombination rates including thermal and many-body effects. Using real-space Monte Carlo integration, the path-integral expressions for realistic three-dimensional models of

Chemical recognition and binding kinetics in a functionalized tunnel junction

\mathrm{In}\mathrm{Ga}\mathrm{As}∕\mathrm{Ga}\mathrm{As}

Real-time coarsening dynamics of Ge∕Si(100) nanostructures

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Tuning biexciton binding and antibinding in core/shell quantum dots

\mathrm{Cd}\mathrm{Se}∕\mathrm{Zn}\mathrm{Se}

FFLO vs Bose-Fermi mixture in polarized 1D Fermi gas on a Feshbach resonance: a 3-body study

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Electron charging in epitaxial Ge quantum dots on Si(100)

\mathrm{In}\mathrm{P}∕\mathrm{In}\mathrm{Ga}\mathrm{P}

A path integral study of the role of correlation in exchange coupling of spins in double quantum dots and optical lattices

dots are evaluated, including anisotropic effective masses. Depending on size, radiative rates of typical dots lie in the regime between strong and intermediate confinement. The results compare favorably to recent experiments and calculations on related dot systems. Configuration interaction calculations using uncorrelated basis sets are found to be severely limited in calculating decay rates.

Effects of fermion flavor on exciton condensation in double-layer systems

4(5)-(2-mercaptoethyl)-1H-imidazole-2-carboxamide is a molecule that has multiple hydrogen bonding sites and a short flexible linker. When tethered to a pair of electrodes, it traps target molecules in a tunnel junction. Surprisingly large recognition-tunneling signals are generated for all naturally occurring DNA bases A, C, G, T and 5-methyl-cytosine. Tunnel current spikes are stochastic and broadly distributed, but characteristic enough so that individual bases can be identified as a tunneling probe is scanned over DNA oligomers. Each base yields a recognizable burst of signal, the duration of which is controlled entirely by the probe speed, down to speeds of 1 nm s -1, implying a maximum off-rate of 3 s -1 for the recognition complex. The same measurements yield a lower bound on the on-rate of 1 M -1 s -1. Despite the stochastic nature of the signals, an optimized multiparameter fit allows base calling from a single signal peak with an accuracy that can exceed 80% when a single type of nucleotide is present in the junction, meaning that recognition-tunneling is capable of true single-molecule analysis. The accuracy increases to 95% when multiple spikes in a signal cluster are analyzed.

Path integral Monte Carlo simulations of nanowires and quantum point contacts

The coarsening dynamics of Ge∕Si(100) nanostructures were monitored using real-time, elevated temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Gas-source molecular beam epitaxy from digermane onto Si(100) was used to produce mixed hut and pyramid cluster ensembles. The width of the most elongated rectangular-based hut clusters was always less than the side length of square-based pyramid clusters for the growth conditions employed. This suggests that pyramid elongation to form hut clusters occurred at early growth stages for some smaller clusters. A previously unidentified coarsening mechanism was characterized during growth temperature annealing and was interpreted using atomistic elastic modeling. Pyramid clusters were more stable than narrow hut clusters with larger volumes. These larger volume huts decayed by reducing their length at a constant width, finally becoming small pyramids. These small pyramids are less stable than those that never elongated to form huts and consequently dissolve. The decreas...

Lateral spatial switching of excitons using vertical electric fields in semiconductor quantum rings

We use a path integral quantum Monte Carlo method to simulate excitons and biexcitons in core/shell nanocrystals with Type-I, Type-II, and quasi-Type-II band alignments. Quantum Monte Carlo techniques allow for all quantum correlations to be included when determining the thermal ground state, thus producing accurate predictions of biexciton binding. These subtle quantum correlations are found to cause the biexciton to be binding with Type-I carrier localization and strongly antibinding with Type-II carrier localization, in agreement with experiment for both core/shell nanocrystals and dot in rod nanocrystal structures. Simple treatments based on perturbative approaches are shown to miss this important transition in the biexciton binding. Understanding these correlations offers prospects to engineer strong biexciton antibinding, which is crucial to the design of nanocrystals for single-exciton lasing applications.