Phonon-assisted relaxation kinetics of statistically degenerate excitons in high-quality quantum wells

A. V. Soroko and A. L. Ivanov
Phys. Rev. B 65, 165310 – Published 4 April 2002
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Abstract

Acoustic-phonon-assisted thermalization kinetics of excitons in quantum wells (QW’s) is developed for small concentrations of particles, ρ2D109cm1, when particle-particle interaction can be neglected, while Bose-Einstein statistics already strongly influences the relaxation processes at low temperatures. In this case thermalization of QW excitons occurs through nonequilibrium states and is given by the following scenario. During the first transient stage, which lasts a few characteristic scattering times, the correlations with an initial distribution of QW excitons disappear. The next, adiabatic stage of thermalization usually takes many characteristic scattering times, depends only upon two control parameters, the lattice temperature Tb and the degeneracy temperature T0ρ2D, and is characterized by a quasiequilibrated distribution of high-energy QW excitons with effective temperature T(t). We show that the thermalization law of high-energy particles is given by δT(t)=T(t)Tbeλ0t/t, where λ0 is a marginal value of the continuous eigenvalue spectrum of the linearized kinetics. By analyzing the linearized phonon-assisted kinetics of statistically degenerate QW excitons, we study the dependence λ0=λ0(Tb,T0). Our numerical estimates refer to high-quality GaAs and ZnSe QW’s. Finally, we propose a special design of GaAs-based microcavities, which considerably weakens the bottleneck effect in relaxation of excitons (polaritons) and allows us to optimize the acoustic-phonon-assisted thermalization processes.

  • Received 25 October 2001

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.65.165310

©2002 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

A. V. Soroko* and A. L. Ivanov

  • Department of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF24 3YB, Wales, United Kingdom

  • *Email address: Alexander.Soroko@astro.cf.ac.uk

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Vol. 65, Iss. 16 — 15 April 2002

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