Probing fluctuations in photon emission statistics of spin injected quantum dots with time dependent electronic excitation
Electrically spin-injected ensembles of InGaAs/GaAs quantum dots emit circularly polarized single photons, with the emission helicity determined by the spin polarization of the injected electrons. A ferromagnetic CoFeB spin-injection layer with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, combined with an MgO tunnel barrier, enables spin-polarized electron injection into the quantum-dot active region, resulting in circularly polarized photon emission at zero applied magnetic field. These devices realize direct spin-charge-photon conversion in an electrically driven, microelectronics-compatible quantum light source that operates without an external pump laser. Using an extended Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometer with four detectors and time-tagged readout, we measure time-resolved photon-number statistics that resolve up to $|2\rangle$ Fock states within a single excitation cycle. While single-photon ($n=|1\rangle$) emission tracks the electrical excitation pulse as expected, the two-photon ($n=|2\rangle$) statistics exhibit pronounced fluctuations at multiple temporal positions within the pulse. These fluctuations vanish upon demagnetization of the spin-injection layer, establishing a direct link between the multi-photon emission dynamics and the spin polarization of the injected carriers. The observations indicate that spin injection controls not only the helicity of the emitted photons but also higher-order temporal correlations of the emission. The behavior is phenomenologically captured by inserting both a variable excitation mechanism and a set of multi-emitter collapse operators within a stochastic wave function evolution. The platform thus opens a route to electrically driven, spin-controlled single and multi-photon Fock-state sources and provides a testbed for spin-conditioned multi-emitter dynamics in solid-state quantum light sources.
Authors
- Chiran Wijesundara (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7117-3625)
- Herbert F. Fotso (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7952-6256)
- Tim O. Thomay (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2271-6803)
- Vincent Iglesias-Cardinale
- Bo Xu
- Yuan Lu
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.40593
- Primary Topic
- Semiconductor Quantum Structures and Devices
- Type
- preprint