CPM Seminar

Phonon-Dressed Mollow Triplets and Mollow Quintuplets from Coherently Driven Quantum Dots

Stephen Hughes

Department of Physics
Queen's University

In 1969 Mollow demonstrated that the fluorescence spectrum of a laser driven two-level atom has two Rabi sidebands in addition to a central Rayleigh-scattering peak, producing the so-called Mollow triplet [1]. This striking quantum optics phenomenon has been widely studied in a number of atomic and molecular systems. For decades the semiconductor optics community has been trying to access the "quantum-dot Mollow triplet," and, by combining single quantum dots with semiconductor cavities, recently succeeded [2]. Coherently driven quantum dots are fundamentally interesting and have applications in quantum information science.

Quantum dots are often likened to ‘artificial atoms,’ but they have unique solid-state microscopic processes, such as electron-phonon scattering. This talk will describe the resonance fluorescence spectra of a driven quantum dot placed inside a semiconductor microcavity and interacting with an acoustic phonon bath [3]. A series of light-matter interaction regimes that are unique to the semiconductor environment will be introduced including, phonon-mediated incoherent excitation [4], excitation induced dephasing and pronounced exciton-cavity feeding [3,5]. I will describe a polaron master equation approach to understanding these novel phenomena and make a direct connection to experimental data for InAs quantum dots. Finally, I will show some very recent theory and experiments that introduce the ‘Mollow quintuplet’ regime where the usual Mollow triplet evolves into five separate spectral peaks.

[1] B. R. Mollow, Phys. Rev. 188, 1969 (1969).
[2] See, e.g., E. B. Flagg et al., Nature Phys. 5, 203> (2009); A. N. Vamivakas et al., Nature Phys. 5, 198 (2009).
[3] C. Roy and S. Hughes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 247403 (2011).
[4] S. Weiler., A. Ulhaq, S. M. Ulrich, D. Richter, M. Jetteri, P. Michler, C. Roy, and S. Hughes, Phys. Rev. B Rapid Communications 86, 241304 (2012).
[5] S. M. Ulrich, S. Ates, S. Reitzenstein, A Loffler, A. Forchel, and P. Michler, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 247402 (2011).