Photon echo in the ensemble of semiconductor quantum dots spread on a glass substrate K R Karimullin, M V Knyazev, A I Arzhanov et al. Abstract. Influence of quantum fluctuations in a system consisting of a quantum dot and the reservoir of acoustic phonons on processes in which the quantum dot takes part is investigated. Under some conditions this influence is shown to be very strong. We find a contribution from the quantum fluctuations to the self-energy function of the exciton coupled to the quantum dot.
INTRODUCTIONSemiconductor quantum dots being nanometer-scale islands have unique optical properties [1] that make them attractive candidates for many optoelectronic applications such as new types of single-photon sources [2,3] and lasers [4,5], or for use as computational building blocks of a quantum computer [6][7][8]. However, quantum dots are embedded in a surrounding solid, and the carriers confined to the dot interact with their environment most notably with phonons. Because of a strong suppression of phonon induced transitions between electronic states localized in quantum dots, the carrier-phonon interaction results in the decoherence of the optical polarization i.e. in pure dephasing being a major source for the decoherence. For S-shell excitons, the dominant sources of the pure dephasing are the longitudinal acoustic phonons [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Pure dephasing is caused by real irreducible processes. However, a significant contribution to the dot-reservoir interaction comes also from quantum fluctuations in which the reservoir degrees of freedom manifest themselves in a virtual state (i.e. the energies of the intermediate states are not equal to the energy of the initial and final state). Quantum fluctuations give rise to the shift of the dot energy levels known as the polaron shift. They also give a dominant contribution to self-energy functions of the quantum dots (QD) states. The energy dependence of QD selfenergy functions can have a significant effect on the emission spectra of a strongly coupled quantum-dot cavity systems [18][19][20][21]. The problem is that despite the self-energy functions are used for description of the evolution QD interacting with environment, usually they are derived from quantum-field Green functions. A consistent description of quantum dynamics is ensured only by making use of the Green operator. In atomic physics where the self-energy functions of atomic states determine the Lamb shifts and widths of spectral lines the Green-function method has turned out to be very effective. The reason for this is the weakness of the electromagnetic interaction. However, the self-interaction of QD excitons is much more significant than the interaction of an atom with its own radiation field. In this paper we investigate the effect of