COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Striving toward a combined experimental and theoretical study of many-body effects of excess free electrons on charged X excitons, Bruce D. McCombe of the University at Buffalo invited Alexander B. Dzyubenko of the Russian Academy of Sciences General Physics Institute for a two-month visit in the winter of 2001. The opportunity to collaborate with Dzyubenko, whose work has been pivotal for McCombe’s group in understanding concurrent observations of internal transitions, was a crucial objective of the project.

A combination of the experimental expertise of McCombe’s group with the recent theoretical advances of Dzyubenko was a rather unique feature of this project. It has allowed McCombe’s group to develop a strong and effective experiment-theory interaction, which would not have been possible otherwise. This has resulted in very rapid progress in understanding the many body effects on the transitions observed in the experimental optically-detected cyclotron resonance (ODR) spectra, with considerable insight generated by the flexible nature of the discussions.

McCombe reports that he fully intends to continue this collaboration in the area of many-body effects on exciton-like states in quantum wells by extending their experiments and theoretical work. Additionally, he anticipates extending this work to the case of excitons in quantum dots in the presence of excess electrons and perhaps even further.

Bruce D. McCombe and Alexander B. Dzyubenko