Energy spectrum of confined positively charged excitons in single quantum dots

Abstract: A theoretical model, which relates the binding energy of a positively charged exciton in a quantum dot with the confinement energy is presented. It is shown that the binding energy, defined as the energy difference between the corresponding charged and neutral complexes confined on the same excitonic shell strongly depends on the shell index. Moreover, it is shown that the ratio of the binding energy for positively charged excitons from the $p$- and $s$-shells of a dot depends mainly on the nearly perfect confinement in the dot, which is due to the "hidden symmetry" of the multi-electron-hole system. We applied the theory to the excitons confined to a single GaAlAs/AlAs quantum dots. The relevant binding energy was determined using the micro-photoluminescence and micro-photoluminescence excitation magneto-spectroscopy. We show that within our theory, the confinement energy determined using the ratio of the binding energy corresponds well to the actual confinement energy of the investigated dot.