Magneto-optical response of CdSe nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical study of the Landé g-factors in CdSe nanostructures, revealing size and shape dependencies, anisotropy, and agreement with experimental data, with implications for understanding their magnetic properties.

Contribution

The study introduces a non-perturbative, gauge-invariant tight-binding approach to calculate electron and hole g-factors in semiconductor nanostructures, including size and aspect ratio effects.

Findings

Electron g-factors are anisotropic and depend on nanocrystal aspect ratio.

Calculated g-factors agree quantitatively with experimental measurements.

Hole g-factors oscillate with size due to valence band mixing.

Abstract

We present theoretical calculations of the Land\'e g-factors of semiconductor nanostructures using a time-dependent empirical tight-binding method. The eigenenergies and eigenfunctions of the band edge states are calculated as a function of an external magnetic field with the electromagnetic field incorporated into the tight-binding Hamiltonian in a gauge-invariant form. The spin-orbit interaction and magnetic field are treated non-perturbatively. The g-factors are extracted from the energy splitting of the eigenstates induced by the applied magnetic field. Both electron and hole g-factors are investigated for CdSe nanostructures. The size and aspect ratio dependence of g-factors is studied. We observe that the electron g-factors are anisotropic and find that the calculated values agree quantitatively with experimental data. We conclude that the two distinct g-factor values extracted from time resolved Faraday rotation experiments should be assigned to the anisotropic in plane ($g_\parallel$) and out of plane ($g_z$) electron g-factors, rather than to isotropic electron and exciton g-factors. We find that the anisotropy in the electron g-factor depends on the aspect ratio of the nanocrystal. The g-factor anisotropy derived from the wurtzite structure and from the non-unity aspect ratio may cancel each other in some regime. We observe that hole g-factors oscillate as a function of size, due to size dependent mixing between the heavy hole-light hole components of the valence band edge states. Extension to the calculation of exciton g-factors is discussed.