Aharonov-Bohm effect of excitons in nano-rings

Hui Hu, Jia-Lin Zhu, Dai-Jun Li, Jia-Jiong Xiong

Published 2000-10-20, updated 2000-10-21Version 2

The magnetic field effects on excitons in an InAs nano-ring are studied theoretically. By numerically diagonalizing the effective-mass Hamiltonian of the problem, which can be separated into terms in centre-of-mass and relative coordinates, we calculate the low-lying exciton energy levels and oscillator strengths as a function of the width of the ring and the strength of the external magnetic field. The analytical results are obtained for a narrow-width nano-ring in which the radial motion is the fastest one and adiabatically decoupled from the azimuthal motions. It is shown that in the presence of Coulomb correlation, the so called Aharonov-Bohm effect of excitons exists in a finite (but small) width nano-ring. However, when the ring width becomes large, the non-simply-connected geometry of nano-rings is destroyed and in turn yields the suppression of Aharonov-Bohm effect. The conditional probability distribution calculated for the low-lying exction states allows identification of the presence of Aharonov-Bohm effect. The linear optical susceptibility is also calculated as a function of the magnetic field, to be confronted with the future measurements of optical emission experiments on InAs nano-rings.