Rabi oscillations and photocurrent in quantum-dot tunnelling junctions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how relaxation processes affect Rabi oscillations and photocurrent generation in quantum-dot tunneling junctions, revealing different behaviors depending on electron and hole tunneling rates.

Contribution

It provides an analytical and numerical analysis of Rabi oscillations in quantum dots with asymmetric tunneling rates, highlighting their impact on photocurrent behavior.

Findings

Oscillations attenuate with equal tunnel rates, showing Rabi frequency behavior.

Asymmetry in tunneling rates causes oscillation frequency to diminish and eventually vanish.

Different charge transfer behaviors are observed depending on tunneling rate symmetry.

Abstract

Motivated by the experiments by Zrenner et al. [Nature 418, 612 (2002)], we study the influence of relaxation processes on converting Rabi oscillations in a strongly biased single-quantum-dot photodiode into deterministic photocurrents. We show that the behavior of a quantum dot with different tunnel rates for electron and holes is qualitatively different from that with the equal tunnel rates: in the latter case the current shows attenuating oscillations with the Rabi frequency. In contrast, for different electrons and holes tunnelling rates, the frequency of these oscillations diminishes, and they disappear beyond a definite asymmetry threshold. We give an analytical solution of the problem and a numerical example showing a different behaviour of the transferred charge in the small attenuation limit for equal and different tunnel rates for electrons and holes.