The
idea of phonon bottlenecks has long been pursued in nanoscale
materials for their application in hot exciton devices, such as photovoltaics.
Decades ago, it was shown that there is no quantum phonon bottleneck
in strongly confined quantum dots due to their physics of quantum
confinement. More recently, it was proposed that there are hot phonon
bottlenecks in metal halide perovskites due to their physics. Recent
work has called into question these bottlenecks in metal halide perovskites.
Here, we compare hot exciton cooling in a range of sizes of CsPbBr3 nanocrystals from weakly to strongly confined. These results
are compared to strongly confined CdSe quantum dots of two sizes and
degrees of quantum confinement. CdSe is a model system as a ruler
for measuring hot exciton cooling being fast, by virtue of its efficient
Auger-assisted processes. By virtue of 3 ps time resolution, the hot
exciton photoluminescence can now be directly observed, which is the
most direct measure of the presence of hot excitons and their lifetimes.
The hot exciton photoluminescence decays on nearly the same 2 ps time
scale on both the weakly confined perovskite and the larger CdSe quantum
dots, much faster than the 10 ps cooling predicted by transient absorption
experiments. The smaller CdSe quantum dot has still faster cooling,
as expected from quantum size effects. The quantum dots of perovskites
show extremely fast hot exciton cooling, decaying faster than detection
limits of <1 ps, even faster than the CdSe system, suggesting the
efficiency of Auger processes in these metal halide perovskite nanocrystals
and especially in their quantum dot form. These results across a range
of sizes of nanocrystals reveal extremely fast hot exciton cooling
at high exciton density, independent of composition, but dependent
upon size. Hence these metal halide perovskite nanocrystals seem to
cool heavily following quantum dot physics.