Confinement regime in self-assembled InAs/InAlGaAs/InP quantum dashes determined from exciton and biexciton recombination kinetics

The exciton and biexciton confinement regimes in strongly anisotropic epitaxial InAs nanostructures called quantum dashes (QDashes) embedded in an In0.53Ga0.23Al0.24As matrix, which is lattice-matched to InP(001) substrate, have been investigated. For that purpose, we have performed low-temperature spatially and polarization-resolved photoluminescence and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements on a set of single QDashes. The main conclusions are drawn based on the experimentally obtained distribution of the ratio between the exciton and biexciton lifetimes. We have found that a majority of QDashes for which the above mentioned ratio falls into the range of 1.2 +/- 0.1-1.6 +/- 0.1 corresponds to the so called intermediate confinement regime, whereas for several cases, it is close to 1 or 2, suggesting reaching the conditions of weak and strong confinement, respectively. Eventually, we support this data with dependence of the lifetimes' ratio on the biexciton binding energy, implying importance of Coulomb correlations, which change significantly with the confinement regime. Published by AIP Publishing.