We demonstrate that semiconductor quantum dots can be excited efficiently in a resonant three-photon process, whilst resonant two-photon excitation is highly suppressed. Time-dependent Floquet theory is used to quantify the strength of the multi-photon processes and model the experimental results. The efficiency of these transitions can be drawn directly from parity considerations in the electron and hole wavefunctions in semiconductor quantum dots. Finally, we exploit this technique to probe intrinsic properties of InGaN quantum dots. In contrast to non-resonant excitation, slow relaxation of charge carriers is avoided which allows us to measure directly the radiative lifetime of the lowest energy exciton states. Since the emission energy is detuned far from the resonant driving laser field, polarization filtering is not required and emission with a greater degree of linear polarization is observed compared to non-resonant excitation.
@article{arxiv.2202.02034,
title = {Three-photon excitation of quantum two-level systems},
author = {Viviana Villafañe and Bianca Scaparra and Manuel Rieger and Stefan Appel and Rahul Trivedi and Tongtong Zhu and John Jarman and Rachel A. Oliver and Robert A. Taylor and Jonathan J. Finley and Kai Mueller},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.02034},
year = {2023}
}