Optical anisotropy of electronic excitations in elliptical quantum dots

Abstract

The authors report that anisotropic confining potentials in laterally coupled semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have large impacts in optical transitions and energies of intershell collective electronic excitations. The observed anisotropies are revealed by inelastic light scattering as a function of the in-plane direction of light polarization and can be finely controlled by modifying the geometrical shape of the QDs. These experiments show that the tuning of the QD confinement potential offers a powerful method to manipulate electronic states and far-infrared intershell optical transitions in QDs.