Light-induced orientation of electron spins in the negatively charged InP quantum dots is found to persist longer than 100 s. We have proved experimentally that the long-lived orientation is due to slow relaxation of the electron spins rather than to the dynamic nuclear polarization effects.

Photoluminescence (PL) and reflectivity spectra of a high-quality InGaAs/GaAs quantum well structure reveal a series of ultra-narrow peaks attributed to the quantum confined exciton states. The intensity of these peaks decreases as a function of temperature, while the linewidths demonstrate a complex and peculiar behavior. At low pumping the widths of all peaks remain quite narrow (< 0.1 meV) in the whole temperature range studied, 4 -30 K. At the stronger pumping, the linewidth first increases and than drops down with the temperature rise. Pump-probe experiments show two characteristic time scales in the exciton decay, < 10 ps and 15 -45 ns, respectively. We interpret all these data by an interplay between the exciton recombination within the light cone, the exciton relaxation from a nonradiative reservoir to the light cone, and the thermal dissociation of the nonradiative excitons. The broadening of the low energy exciton lines is governed by the radiative recombination and scattering with reservoir excitons while for the higher energy states the linewidths are also dependent on the acoustic phonon relaxation processes.

The binding energy and the corresponding wave function of excitons in GaAs-based finite square quantum wells (QWs) are calculated by the direct numerical solution of the three-dimensional Schrödinger equation. The precise results for the lowest exciton state are obtained by the Hamiltonian discretization using the high-order finite-difference scheme. The microscopic calculations are compared with the results obtained by the standard variational approach. The exciton binding energies found by two methods coincide within 0.1 meV for the wide range of QW widths. The radiative decay rate is calculated for QWs of various widths using the exciton wave functions obtained by direct and variational methods. The radiative decay rates are confronted with the experimental data measured for high-quality GaAs/AlGaAs and InGaAs/GaAs QW heterostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy. The calculated and measured values are in good agreement, though slight differences with earlier calculations of the radiative decay rate are observed.

Spins of resident electrons in charged quantum dots ͑QD's͒ act as local magnets inducing the Zeeman splitting of excitons trapped into dots. This is evidenced by the observation of quantum beats in the linearly polarized time-resolved photoluminescence of a biased array of self-assembled InP QD's. An external magnetic field is found to shorten the spin beats' decay time keeping constant the frequency of the beats. A model using the pseudospin formalism allows one to attribute the observed quantum beats to the radiative decay of hot trions having two electrons that occupy different energy levels in a QD.