Excitonic recombination dynamics in shallow quantum wells

We report a comprehensive study of carrier-recombination dynamics in shallow AlxGa1-xAs/GaAs quantum wells. At low crystal temperature (2 K), the excitonic radiative recombination time is shown to be strongly enhanced in shallow quantum wells with x>0.01, consistently with a model that takes into account the thermal equilibrium between the three-dimensional exciton gas of the barrier and the two-dimensional exciton gas, which are closer in energy as x decreases. Furthermore, we demonstrate the existence of a thermally activated escape mechanism due to the low effective barrier height in these structures. The nonradiative recombination is shown to dominate the carrier dynamics for temperatures as low as 10 K for x≈0.01. Our experimental observations are analyzed using three different variational exciton calculations. In particular, we study the crossover from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional behavior of the exciton, which occurs for x as low as 0.01 and affects mainly the oscillator strength, whereas the transition energies in shallow quantum wells can be calculated, to a large extent, using the same approximations as for conventional quantum wells. The peculiar behavior of the oscillator strength at the crossover to the weak confinement regime is obtained by expansion in a large basis.