Magnetic field study of exciton nonradiative broadening excitation spectra in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells

Abstract: Exciton excited states in the quantum well are studied via their effect on the nonradiative broadening of the ground exciton resonance. Dependence of the nonradiative broadening of the ground exciton state on the photon energy of additional laser excitation was measured. Applying magnetic field up to 6 T, we could trace the formation of Landau levels and evolution of the exciton states of size quantization in a 14-nm GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well. Sensitivity of the technique allowed for observation of the second exciton state of size quantization, unavailable for conventional reflectance and photoluminescence spectroscopy. Our interpretation is supported by the numerical calculation of the exciton energies of the heavy-hole and light-hole subsystems. The numerical problems were solved using the finite-difference method on the nonuniform grid. The ground Landau level of the free electron-hole pair was observed and numerically analysed. In addition to energies of the excited states, electron hole distances and exciton-light interaction constant was investigated using the obtained in the numerical procedure exciton wave functions.