title: Universal role of discrete acoustic phonons in the low-temperature optical emission of colloidal quantum dots.
abstract: Multiple energy scales contribute to the radiative properties of colloidal quantum dots, including magnetic interactions, crystal field splitting, Pauli exclusion, and phonons. Identification of the exact physical mechanism which couples first to the dark ground state of colloidal quantum dots, inducing a significant reduction in the radiative lifetime at low temperatures, has thus been under significant debate. Here we present measurements of this phenomenon on a variety of materials as well as on colloidal heterostructures. These show unambiguously that the dominant mechanism is coupling of the ground state to a confined acoustic phonon, and that this mechanism is universal.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Oron
authors.forename: Assaf
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aharoni
authors.forename: Celso
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: de Mello Donega
authors.forename: Jos
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: van Rijssel
authors.forename: Andries
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Meijerink
authors.forename: Uri
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Banin