Measurement of binding energy of negatively charged excitons in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells

Abstract

We report a photoluminescence study of electron-hole complexes in specially designed semiconductor heterostructures. Placing a remote dilute layer of donors at different distances \itshape d \normalfont from the quantum well leads to the transformation of luminescence spectra of neutral ($X$) and negatively charged ($X^{-}$) excitons. The onset of an additional spectral line and its energy dependence on \itshape d \normalfont allows us to unambiguously relate the so-called $X^{-}$ trion state with charged excitons bound on charged donors in a barrier. The results indicate the overestimation in free-trion binding energies from previous studies of GaAs/Al$_{0.3}$Ga$_{0.7}$As quantum wells, and give their corrected values for QWs of width 200 and 300 \AA \space in the limiting case of infinitely distant donors.