In-plane radiative recombination channel of a dark exciton in self-assembled quantum dots

Abstract

We demonstrate evidence for a radiative recombination channel of dark excitons in self-assembled quantum dots. This channel is due to a light hole admixture in the excitonic ground state. Its presence was experimentally confirmed by a direct observation of the dark exciton photoluminescence from a cleaved edge of the sample. The polarization-resolved measurements revealed that a photon created from the dark exciton recombination is emitted only in the direction perpendicular to the growth axis. Strong correlation between the dark exciton lifetime and the in-plane hole $g$ factor enabled us to show that the radiative recombination is a dominant decay channel of the dark excitons in CdTe/ZnTe quantum dots.