Computational study of excitons and biexcitons in semiconductor core/shell nanocrystals of type I and type II

Abstract

In this thesis, we studied electronic structure and optical properties of Type-I, Type-II, and quasi Type-II semiconductor nanocrystals (also known as colloidal quantum dots). For a parametric study, we developed quantum mechanical models and solved them using both analytical and numerical techniques. The simulation results were compared to the experimental findings. We showed that charge carrier localization at di↵erent spatial locations could be tuned by controlling size parameters of the core and shell. While tuning charge localization, we also predicted photoluminescence peaks of these core/shell nanocrystals using our theoretical and numerical calculations. We demonstrated that Type-II nanocrystals exhibit di↵erent tuning trends compared to the Type-I ones. We also investigated biexcitonic properties of nanocrystals using quantum mechanical simulations, which are important especially in lasing applications. We showed that two-photon absorption mechanism can be tuned by changing the core and shell size in quantum dots. We calculated at which core and shell sizes biexcitons in quantum dots show attractive or repulsive interaction. The computational studies presented in this thesis played an important role in the experimental demonstrations and understanding of controlling excitonic features of core/shell nanocrystals.