Radius dependent shift of surface plasmon frequency in large metallic nanospheres: theory and experiment

Theoretical description of oscillations of electron liquid in large metallic nanospheres (with radius of few tens nm) is formulated within random-phase-approximation semiclassical scheme. Spectrum of plasmons is determined including both surface and volume type excitations. It is demonstrated that only surface plasmons of dipole type can be excited by homogeneous dynamical electric field. The Lorentz friction due to irradiation of electro-magnetic wave by plasmon oscillations is analyzed with respect to the sphere dimension. The resulting shift of resonance frequency turns out to be strongly sensitive to the sphere radius. The form of e-m response of the system of metallic nanospheres embedded in the dielectric medium is found. The theoretical predictions are verified by a measurement of extinction of light due to plasmon excitations in nanosphere colloidal water solutions, for Au and Ag metallic components with radius from 10 to 75 nm. Theoretical predictions and experiments clearly agree in the positions of surface plasmon resonances and in an emergence of the first volume plasmon resonance in the e-m response of the system for limiting big nanosphere radii, when dipole approximation is not exact

Pedestal and Peak Structure in Jet Correlation

We study the characteristics of correlation between particles in jets produced in heavy-ion collisions. In the framework of parton recombination we calculate the $\eta$ and $\phi$ distributions of a pion associated with a trigger particle. The origin of the pedestal in $\Delta\eta$ is related to the longitudinal expansion of the thermal partons that are enhanced by the energy loss of hard partons traversing the bulk medium. The peaks in $\Delta\eta$ and $\Delta\phi$ are related to the same angular spread of the shower partons in a jet cone. No artificial short- or long-range correlations are put in by hand. A large part of the correlation between hadrons in jets is due to the correlation among the shower partons arising from momentum conservation. Recombination between thermal and shower partons dominates the correlation characterisitics in the intermediate $p_T$ region.Comment: 14 pages in LaTex and 2 figures in ep

Magnetic-field-induced binding of few-electron systems in shallow quantum dots

Binding of few-electron systems in two-dimensional potential cavities in the presence of an external magnetic field is studied with the exact diagonalization approach. We demonstrate that for shallow cavities the few-electron system becomes bound only under the application of a strong magnetic field. The critical value of the depth of the cavity allowing the formation of a bound state decreases with magnetic field in a non-smooth fashion, due to the increasing angular momentum of the first bound state. In the high magnetic field limit the binding energies and the critical values for the depth of the potential cavity allowing the formation of a bound system tend to the classical values

Paramagnetic-diamagnetic interplay in quantum dots for non-zero temperatures

In the usual Fock-and Darwin-formalism with parabolic potential characterized by the confining energy \eps_o := \hbar\omega_o= 3.37 meV, but including explicitly also the Zeeman coupling between spin and magnetic field, we study the combined orbital and spin magnetic properties of quantum dots in a two-dimensional electron gas with parameters for GaAs, for N =1 and N >> 1 electrons on the dot. For N=1 the magnetization M(T,B) consists of a paramagnetic spin contribution and a diamagnetic orbital contribution, which dominate in a non-trivial way at low temperature and fields rsp. high temperature and fields. For N >> 1, where orbital and spin effects are intrinsically coupled in a subtle way and cannot be separated, we find in a simplified Hartree approximation that at N=m^2, i.e. at a half-filled last shell, M(T,B,N) is parallel (antiparallel) to the magnetic field, if temperatures and fields are low enough (high enough), whereas for N\ne m^2 the magnetization oscillates with B and N as a T-dependent periodic function of the variable x:=\sqrt{N}eB/(2m^*c\omega_o), with T-independent period \Delta x =1 (where m^* := 0.067 m_o is the small effective mass of GaAs, while m_o is the electron mass). Correspondingly, by an adiabatic demagnetization process, which should only be fast enough with respect to the slow transient time of the magnetic properties of the dot, the temperature of the dot diminishes rsp. increases with decreasing magnetic field, and in some cases we obtain quite pronounced effects.Comment: LaTeX, 28 pages; including three .eps-figures; final version accepted by J. Phys. CM, with minimal changes w.r.to v

Correlation between electrons and vortices in quantum dots

Exact many-body wave functions for quantum dots containing up to four interacting electrons are computed and we investigated the distribution of the wave function nodes, also called vortices. For this purpose, we evaluate the reduced wave function by fixing the positions of all but one electron and determine the locations of its zeros. We find that the zeros are strongly correlated with respect to each other and with respect to the position of the electrons and formulate rules describing their distribution. No multiple zeros are found, i.e. vortices with vorticity larger than one. Our exact calculations are compared to results extracted from the recently proposed rotating electron molecule (REM) wave functions

Electron spin and charge switching in a coupled quantum dot quantum ring system

Few-electron systems confined in a quantum dot laterally coupled to a surrounding quantum ring in the presence of an external magnetic field are studied by exact diagonalization. The distribution of electrons between the dot and the ring is influenced by the relative strength of the dot and ring confinement, the gate voltage and the magnetic field which induces transitions of electrons between the two parts of the system. These transitions are accompanied by changes in the periodicity of the Aharonov-Bohm oscillations of the ground-state angular momentum. The singlet-triplet splitting for a two electron system with one electron confined in the dot and the other in the ring exhibits piecewise linear dependence on the external field due to the Aharonov-Bohm effect for the ring-confined electron, in contrast to smooth oscillatory dependence of the exchange energy for laterally coupled dots in the side-by-side geometry.Comment: to appear in PRB in August 200

The maximum density droplet to lower density droplet transition in quantum dots

We show that, Landau level mixing in two-dimensional quantum dot wave functions can be taken into account very effectively by multiplying the exact lowest Landau level wave functions by a Jastrow factor which is optimized by variance minimization. The comparison between exact diagonalization and fixed phase diffusion Monte Carlo results suggests that the phase of the many-body wave functions are not affected much by Landau level mixing. We apply these wave functions to study the transition from the maximum density droplet state (incipient integer quantum Hall state with angular momentum L=N(N-1)/2) to lower density droplet states (L>N(N-1)/2).Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Resonant nature of phonon-induced damping of Rabi oscillations in quantum dots

Optically controlled coherent dynamics of charge (excitonic) degrees of freedom in a semiconductor quantum dot under the influence of lattice dynamics (phonons) is discussed theoretically. We show that the dynamics of the lattice response in the strongly non-linear regime is governed by a semiclassical resonance between the phonon modes and the optically driven dynamics. We stress on the importance of the stability of intermediate states for the truly coherent control.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; final version; moderate changes, new titl

Phonon effects on the radiative recombination of excitons in double quantum dots

We study theoretically the radiative recombination of excitons in double quantum dots in the presence of carrier-phonon coupling. We show that the phonon-induced pure dephasing effects and transitions between the exciton states strongly modify the spontaneous emission process and make it sensitive to temperature, which may lead to non-monotonic temperature dependence of the time-resolved luminescence. We show also that under specific resonance conditions the biexcitonic interband polarization can be coherently transferred to the excitonic one, leading to an extended life time of the total coherent polarization, which is reflected in the nonlinear optical spectrum of the system. We study the stability of this effect against phonon-induced decoherence.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure