We have measured the vertical Stark effect of excitons confined to individual self-assembled ring-shaped quantum dots. We find that the excitons have very large permanent dipole moments corresponding to electronhole separations up to 2.5 nm, comparable to the nanostructures' physical height. We find a trend of both permanent dipole moment and polarizability on the emission energy, but a very strong correlation between the permanent dipole moment and the polarizability.

The self-assembly of semiconductor quantum dots has opened up new opportunities in photonics. Quantum dots are usually described as 'artificial atoms', because electron and hole confinement gives rise to discrete energy levels. This picture can be justified from the shell structure observed as a quantum dot is filled either with excitons (bound electron-hole pairs) or with electrons. The discrete energy levels have been most spectacularly exploited in single photon sources that use a single quantum dot as emitter. At low temperatures, the artificial atom picture is strengthened by the long coherence times of excitons in quantum dots, motivating the application of quantum dots in quantum optics and quantum information processing. In this context, excitons in quantum dots have already been manipulated coherently. We show here that quantum dots can also possess electronic states that go far beyond the artificial atom model. These states are a coherent hybridization of localized quantum dot states and extended continuum states: they have no analogue in atomic physics. The states are generated by the emission of a photon from a quantum dot. We show how a new version of the Anderson model that describes interactions between localized and extended states can account for the observed hybridization.

We present results on the influence of a magnetic field on excitons in semiconductor quantum dots, concentrating on the diamagnetic curvature. We use samples with a bimodal ensemble photoluminescence ͑PL͒ and we find that for the low-energy PL branch, the diamagnetic curvature is independent of charge, yet for the high-energy branch, the diamagnetic curvature is strongly reduced with excess charge. Guided by model calculations, we interpret the two classes as typical of the strong and intermediate confinement regimes. In the light of this, we predict that in the weak confinement regime the excitonic diamagnetic shift is strongly dependent on surplus charge, corresponding to a reversal in sign of the conventional diamagnetic shift for neutral excitons.

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