Temperature dependence of microscopic photoluminescence spectra of quantum dots and quantum wells

We succeeded in observing the temperature dependence of the exciton line width in the range of several ten mu eV in the self-assembled quantum dots (QDs) by combining microscopic photoluminescence (mu-PL) and submicron photomasks. It was found that the line width of QDs, which was believed to be temperature-independent, does depend on temperature, suggesting the contribution of acoustic phonons to the dephasing process. Moreover, this method was found to be powerful in probing the microscopic structures of heterointerfaces of quantum wells (QWs) and we clarified the difference between (1 0 0) and (4 1 1) heterointerfaces, as evidenced by the temperature-dependent mu-PL spectra. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.