We study the effect of elastic anisotropic biaxial strain, induced by a piezoelectric actuator, on the light emitted by neutral excitons confined in different kinds of epitaxial quantum dots. We find that the light polarization rotates by up to $~$80${}^{°}$ and the fine structure splitting (FSS) varies nonmonotonically by several tens of $\mu$eV as the strain is varied. These findings provide the experimental proof of a recently predicted strain-induced anticrossing of the bright states of neutral excitons in quantum dots. Calculations on model dots qualitatively reproduce the observations and suggest that the minimum reachable FSS critically depends on the orientation of the strain axis relative to the dot elongation.

In this work we study theoretically and experimentally the multi-particle structure of the so-called type-II quantum dots with spatially separated electrons and holes. Our calculations based on customarily developed full configuration interaction ap- proach reveal that exciton complexes containing holes interacting with two or more electrons exhibit fairly large antibinding energies. This effect is found to be the hallmark of the type-II confinement. In addition, an approximate self-consistent solution of the multi-exciton problem allows us to explain two pronounced phenomena: the blue-shift of the emission with pumping and the large inhomogeneous spectral broadening, both of those eluding explanation so far. The results are confirmed by detailed intensity and polarization resolved photoluminescence measurements on a number of type-II samples.

We present a detailed investigation of different excitonic states weakly confined in single GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots obtained by the Al droplet-etching method. For our analysis we make use of temperature-, polarization-, and magnetic-field-dependent $\mu$-photoluminescence measurements, which allow us to identify different excited states of the quantum dot system. Besides that, we present a comprehensive analysis of $g$-factors and diamagnetic coefficients of charged and neutral excitonic states in Voigt and Faraday configuration. Supported by theoretical calculations by the configuration-interaction method, we show that the widely used single-particle Zeeman Hamiltonian cannot be used to extract reliable values of the $g$-factors of the constituent particles from excitonic transition measurements.

Excitonic fine structure splitting in quantum dots is closely related to the lateral shape of the wave functions. We have studied theoretically the fine structure splitting in InAs quantum dots with a type-II confinement imposed by a GaAsSb capping layer. We show that very small values of the fine structure splitting comparable with the natural linewidth of the excitonic transitions are achievable for realistic quantum dots despite the structural elongation and the piezoelectric field. For example, varying the capping layer thickness allows for a fine tuning of the splitting energy. The effect is explained by a strong sensitivity of the hole wave function to the quantum dot structure and a mutual compensation of the electron and hole anisotropies. The oscillator strength of the excitonic transitions in the studied quantum dots is comparable to those with a type-I confinement which makes the dots attractive for quantum communication technology as emitters of polarization-entangled photon pairs.

The spin structure and spin dynamics of excitons in an ensemble of (In,Al)As/AlAs quantum dots (QDs) with type-I band alignment, containing both direct and indirect band gap dots, are studied. Time-resolved and spectral selective techniques are used to distinguish between the direct and indirect QDs. The exciton fine structure is studied by means of optical alignment and optical orientation techniques in magnetic fields applied in the Faraday or Voigt geometries. A drastic difference in emission polarization is found for the excitons in the direct QDs involving a $\mathrm{\Gamma }$-valley electron and the excitons in the indirect QDs contributed by an $X$-valley electron. We show that in the direct QDs the exciton spin dynamics is controlled by the anisotropic exchange splitting, while in the indirect QDs it is determined by the hyperfine interaction with nuclear field fluctuations. The anisotropic exchange splitting is determined for the direct QD excitons and compared with model calculations.

Light emission from solid-state quantum emitters is inherently prone to environmental decoherence, which results in a line broadening and in the deterioration of photon indistinguishability. Here we employ photon correlation Fourier spectroscopy (PCFS) to study the temporal evolution of such a broadening in two prominent systems: GaAs and In(Ga)As quantum dots. Differently from previous experiments, the emitters are driven with short laser pulses as required for the generation of high-purity single photons, the time scales we probe range from a few nanoseconds to milliseconds and, simultaneously, the spectral resolution we achieve can be as small as ∼ 2µeV. We find pronounced differences in the temporal evolution of different optical transition lines, which we attribute to differences in their homogeneous linewidth and sensitivity to charge noise. We analyze the effect of irradiation with additional white light, which reduces blinking at the cost of enhanced charge noise. Due to its robustness against experimental imperfections and its high temporal resolution and bandwidth, PCFS outperforms established spectroscopy techniques, such as Michelson interferometry. We discuss its practical implementation and the possibility to use it to estimate the indistinguishability of consecutively emitted single photons for applications in quantum communication and photonic-based quantum information processing.