Inhomogeneous broadening and alloy intermixing in low proton dose implanted InAs/GaAs self-assembled quantum dots

In this work, low-temperature photoluminescence (PL) and photoluminescence excitation (PLE) experiments have been carried out to investigate the optical and electronic properties of InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs) subjected to room-temperature proton implantation at various doses (5 × 10(10)-10(14) ions cm(-2)) and subsequent thermal annealing. The energy shift of the main QD emission band is found to increase with increasing implantation dose. Our measurements show clear evidence of an inhomogeneous In/Ga intermixing at low proton implantation doses (≤5 × 10(11) ions cm(-2)), giving rise to the coexistence of intermixed and non-intermixed QDs. For higher implantation doses, a decrease of both the PL linewidth and the intersublevel spacing energy have been found to occur, suggesting that the dot-size, dot-composition and dot-strain distributions evolve towards more uniform ones.