Giant permanent dipole moments of excitons in semiconductor nanostructures

We have measured the vertical Stark effect of excitons confined to individual self-assembled ring-shaped quantum dots. We find that the excitons have very large permanent dipole moments corresponding to electron-hole separations up to 2.5 nm, comparable to the nanostructures’ physical height. We find a trend of both permanent dipole moment and polarizability on the emission energy, but a very strong correlation between the permanent dipole moment and the polarizability.