Electronic and optical properties of [110]-tilted InAs/GaAs quantum dot stacks

Multimillion atom simulations are performed to study stacking-angle (theta) -dependent strain profiles, electronic structure, and polarization-resolved optical modes from [110]-tilted quantum dot stacks (QDSs). Our calculations reveal highly asymmetrical biaxial strain distributions for the tilted QDSs that strongly influence the confinements of hole wave functions and thereby control the polarization response. The calculated values of degree of polarizations, in good agreement with the available experimental data, predict a unique property of the tilted QDSs that the isotropic polarization response can be realized from both [110] and [-110] cleaved edges-a feature inaccessible from the conventional [001] QDSs. Detailed investigations of polar plots further establish that tilting the QDSs provides an additional knob to fine tune their polarization properties.