Radiative cascade from quantum dot metastable spin-blockaded biexciton

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a novel radiative cascade from a metastable biexciton state in a quantum dot, revealing unique polarization and entanglement properties influenced by phonon interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a new type of radiative cascade involving a spin-triplet biexciton state with distinct polarization and entanglement characteristics, expanding understanding of quantum dot emission processes.

Findings

The cascade involves crosslinearly polarized photons.

Phonon emission preserves exciton spin information.

Spectral filtering is ineffective for entanglement distillation in this cascade.

Abstract

We detect a novel radiative cascade from a neutral semiconductor quantum dot. The cascade initiates from a metastable biexciton state in which the holes form a spin-triplet configuration, Pauli-blockaded from relaxation to the spin-singlet ground state. The triplet biexciton has two photon-phonon-photon decay paths. Unlike in the singlet-ground state biexciton radiative cascade, in which the two photons are co-linearly polarized, in the triplet biexciton cascade they are crosslinearly polarized. We measured the two-photon polarization density matrix and show that the phonon emitted when the intermediate exciton relaxes from excited to ground state, preserves the exciton's spin. The phonon, thus, does not carry with it any which-path information other than its energy. Nevertheless, entanglement distillation by spectral filtering was found to be rather ineffective for this cascade. This deficiency results from the opposite sign of the anisotropic electron-hole exchange interaction in the excited exciton relative to that in the ground exciton.