Energy relaxation by multiphonon processes in InAs/GaAs quantum dots

Carrier relaxation and recombination in self-organized InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QD's) is investigated by photoluminescence (PL), PL excitation (PLE), and time-resolved PL spectroscopy. We demonstrate inelastic phonon scattering to be the dominant intradot carrier-relaxation mechanism. Multiphonon processes involving up to four LO phonons from either the InAs QD's, the InAs wetting layer, or the GaAs barrier are resolved. The observation of multiphonon resonances in the PLE spectra of the QD's is discussed in analogy to hot exciton relaxation in higher-dimensional semiconductor systems and proposed to be intricately bound to the inhomogeneity of the QD ensemble in conjunction with a competing nonradiative recombination channel observed for the excited hole states. Carrier capture is found to be a cascade process with the initial capture into excited states taking less than a few picoseconds and the multiphonon (involving three LO phonons) relaxation time of the first excited hole state being 40 ps. The \001] hole state presents a relaxation bottleneck that determines the ground-state population time after nonresonant excitation. For the small self-organized InAs/GaAs QD's the intradot carrier relaxation is shown to be faster than radiative (>1 ns) and nonradiative (approximate to 100 ps) recombination explaining the absence of a ''phonon bottleneck'' effect in the PL spectra.