In this paper we theoretically investigate the statistical light-emission properties of an optically injected bimodal quantum-dot micropillar laser with high spontaneous emission rates. The nanostructured device is described in terms of a stochastic, semiclassically derived rate equation model. We focus on the stochastic switching dynamics between the two fundamental modes and correlate the results with an in-depth bifurcation analysis of the underlying deterministic dynamics. By analyzing different statistical measures, e.g. average intensity, auto- and cross-correlation functions, as well as dwell-time distributions, we give a road map on how to unravel the different dynamic regimes in the presence of large noise from experimentally accessible quantities.

The excitation of semiconductor quantum dots often involves an attached wetting layer with delocalized single-particle energy eigenstates. These wetting-layer states are usually approximated by (orthogonalized) plane waves. We show that this approach is too crude. Even for a simple model based on the effective-mass approximation and containing one or a few lens-shaped quantum dots on a rectangular wetting layer, the wettinglayer states typically show a substantially irregular and complex morphology. To quantify this complexity we use concepts from the field of quantum chaos such as spectral analysis of energy levels, amplitude distributions, and localization of energy eigenstates.