Polarization and magneto-optical properties of excitonic emission from wurtzite CdTe/(Cd,Mg)Te core/shell nanowires.

Wurtzite CdTe and (Cd,Mn)Te nanowires embedded in (Cd,Mg)Te shells are grown by employing vapour-liquid-solid growth mechanism in a system for molecular beam epitaxy. A combined study involving cathodoluminescence, transmission electron microscopy and micro-photoluminescence is used to correlate optical and structural properties in these structures. Typical features of excitonic emission from individual wurtzite nanowires are highlighted including the emission energy of 1.65 eV, polarization properties and the appearance B-exciton related emission at high excitation densities. Angle dependent magneto-optical study performed on individual (Cd,Mn)Te nanowires reveals heavy-hole-like character of A-excitons typical for wurtzite structure and allows to determine the crystal field splitting, ΔCR. The impact of the strain originating from the lattice mismatched shell is discussed and supported by theoretical calculations.

Spin splitting anisotropy in single diluted magnetic nanowire heterostructures.

We study the impact of the nanowire shape anisotropy on the spin splitting of excitonic photoluminescence. The experiments are performed on individual ZnMnTe/ZnMgTe core/shell nanowires as well as on ZnTe/ZnMgTe core/shell nanowires containing optically active magnetic CdMnTe insertions. When the magnetic field is oriented parallel to the nanowire axis, the spin splitting is several times larger than for the perpendicular field. We interpret this pronounced anisotropy as an effect of mixing of valence band states arising from the strain present in the core/shell geometry. This interpretation is further supported by theoretical calculations which allow to reproduce experimental results.

Diluted magnetic semiconductors. Copper joins the family.

Magnetic circular dichroism on quantum dots doped with a small percentage of copper ions show the typical features of diluted magnetic semiconductors.

Giant spin splitting in optically active ZnMnTe/ZnMgTe core/shell nanowires.

An enhancement of the Zeeman splitting as a result of the incorporation of paramagnetic Mn ions in ZnMnTe/ZnMgTe core/shell nanowires is reported. The studied structures are grown by gold-catalyst assisted molecular beam epitaxy. The near band edge emission of these structures, conspicuously absent in the case of uncoated ZnMnTe nanowires, is activated by the presence of ZnMgTe coating. Giant Zeeman splitting of this emission is studied in ensembles of nanowires with various average Mn concentrations of the order of a few percent, as well as in individual nanowires. Thus, we show convincingly that a strong spin sp-d coupling is indeed present in these structures.