| Abstract | We demonstrate that, even when employing above band gap excitation, photons emitted from semiconductor quantum dots can have linewidths that approach their transform-limited values. This is accomplished by using quantum dots embedded within bottom-up photonic nanowires, an approach which mitigates several potential mechanisms that can result in linewidth broadening: (i) Only a single quantum dot is present in each device, (ii) dot nucleation proceeds without the formation of a wetting layer, and (iii) the sidewalls of the photonic nanowire are comprised not of etched facets, but of epitaxially grown crystal planes. Using these structures we achieve linewidths of 2× the transform limit for above band gap excitation. We also demonstrate a highly nonlinear dependence of the linewidth on both excitation power and temperature which can be described by an independent boson model that considers both deformation and piezoelectric exciton-phonon coupling. We find that for sufficiently low excitation powers and temperatures, the observed excess broadening is not dominated by phonon dephasing, a surprising result considering the high phonon occupation that occurs with above band gap excitation. |
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