Clarifying photoluminescence decay dynamics of self-assembled quantum dots

We studied the temperature-dependent photoluminescence (PL) and time-resolved PL spectra of multilayer CdTe/ZnTe quantum dots (QDs) to understand their carrier dynamics. We demonstrated a method of enhancing the confinement of carriers in CdTe QDs by modulating the number of stacked layers, leading to enhanced acoustic phonons up to 67 μeV and reducing the optical phonon coupling to 20 meV with an average phonon energy of 20 meV. The temperature-dependent decay time could be explained using a simple model of the thermal redistribution of carrier states. Thermal escape from hole states during multiphonon scattering occurred only at high temperatures, whereas blue shifts and enhanced PL intensity were expected to enhance the electron–phonon coupling and confinement-induced mixing among discrete state and continuum states with separation energies of 3.5–7.4 meV. Time-resolved PL measurements probed the electric field screening effect as a function of the strain distribution in QDs and was established to be 2.5 ± 0.2 MV/cm.