Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) have been drawing great attention recently as a material for solar energy conversion due to their versatile optical and electrical properties. The QD-sensitized solar cell (QDSC) is one of the burgeoning semiconductor QD solar cells that shows promising developments for the next generation of solar cells. This article focuses on recent developments in QDSCs, inc...

In this paper, the nonlinear rate equations governing a quantum dot laser isused to simulate the transient as well as the steady-state behaviors of the laser.Computation results show that the rate equations are capable of simulating true behaviorof a quantum dot laser. Then, the pump rates of the rate equations (which show indirectelectrical pumping of the quantum dots through a wetting layer) ...

We consider a double quantum dot (DQD) qubit which contains six electrons instead of the usual one or two. In this spin qubit, quantum information is encoded in a low-lying singlet-triplet space much as in the case of a two-electron DQD qubit. We find that initialization, manipulation, and readout can be performed similarly to the two-electron case, and that energy gaps remain large enough that...

In this paper we discussed different switch architectures. We focus mainly on optical buffering. We investigate an all-optical buffer architecture comprising of cascaded stages of quantum-dot semiconductor optical amplifier-based tunable wavelength converters, at 160 Gb/s. We also propose the optical buffer with multi-wavelength converters based on quantum-dot semiconductor optical amplifiers. ...

We report transport measurements on a semiconductor quantum dot with a small number of confined electrons. In the Coulomb blockade regime, conduction is dominated by cotunneling processes. These can be either elastic or inelastic, depending on whether they leave the dot in its ground state or drive it into an excited state, respectively. We are able to discriminate between these two contributio...

We have incorporated an aluminum single electron transistor directly into the defining gate structure of a semiconductor quantum dot, permitting precise measurement of the dot charge. Voltage biasing a gate draws charge from a reservoir into the dot through a single point contact. The dot charge increases continuously for large point contact conductance and in single electron steps with the con...

We present a theoretical investigation of a semiconductor quantum dot interacting with a strongly localized optical field as encountered in high-resolution near-field optical microscopy. The strong gradients of these localized fields suggest that higher-order multipolar interactions will affect the standard electric dipole transition rates and selection rules. For a semiconductor quantum dot in...