Optically active quantum-dot molecules.

Chiral molecules made of coupled achiral semiconductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots, show great promise for photonic applications owing to their prospective uses as configurable building blocks for optically active structures, materials, and devices. Here we present a simple model of optically active quantum-dot molecules, in which each of the quantum dots is assigned a dipole moment associated with the fundamental interband transition between the size-quantized states of its confined charge carriers. This model is used to analytically calculate the rotatory strengths of optical transitions occurring upon the excitation of chiral dimers, trimers, and tetramers of general configurations. The rotatory strengths of such quantum-dot molecules are found to exceed the typical rotatory strengths of chiral molecules by five to six orders of magnitude. We also study how the optical activity of quantum-dot molecules shows up in their circular dichroism spectra when the energy gap between the molecular states is much smaller than the states' lifetime, and maximize the strengths of the circular dichroism peaks by optimizing orientations of the quantum dots in the molecules. Our analytical results provide clear design guidelines for quantum-dot molecules and can prove useful in engineering optically active quantum-dot supercrystals and photonic devices.