Revealing Temperature-Dependent Absorption and Emission Enhancement Factors in Plasmon Coupled Semiconductor Heterostructures

Localized surface plasmon resonances can increase the quantum efficiency of photon emitters through both absorption and spontaneous emission enhancement effects. Despite extensive studies, experimental results that clearly distinguish the two plasmonic enhancement effects are rarely available. Here, we present clear spectral signatures of the plasmonic enhancement effects on the absorption (excitation) and spontaneous emission (Purcell factor) by analyzing the temperature-dependent photoluminescence (PL) properties of an InGaAs/GaAs single quantum well (QW) coupled to colloidal gold nanorods (AuNRs) at different GaAs capping layer thicknesses (d). We find that when the emitting InGaAs layer is close to the AuNRs (d = 5 nm), the plasmonic enhancement effect on the QW PL is dominated by the Purcell factor, which significantly increases the external quantum efficiency of the QW that otherwise barely emits. When d is increased to 10 nm, the temperature dependence of the PL enhancement factor (F) reflects absorption enhancement in the capping layer followed by carrier diffusion and capture by the well. First, F increases with temperature and then decreases following the temperature dependence of the carrier diffusion coefficient in GaAs. By factoring out the contribution of the captured carriers to F, it is shown that carrier transfer to the well reaches saturation with increasing incident laser power. In addition to providing insight into the plasmonic enhancement mechanism, the results presented in this work suggest that colloidal plasmonic nanoparticles can be used as simple probes for understanding carrier transport phenomena in arbitrary semiconductor heterostructures.