Three-electron dynamics of the interparticle Coulombic decay with two-dimensional continuum confinement.

In a pair of self-assembled or gated laterally arranged quantum dots, an electronically excited state can undergo interparticle Coulombic decay. Then, an electron from a neighbor quantum dot is emitted into the electronic continuum along the two available dimensions. This study proves that the process is not only operative among two but also among three quantum dots, where a second electron-emitting dot causes a rate increase by a factor of two according to the predictions from the analytical Wigner-Weisskopf rate equation. The predictions hold over the complete range of conformation angles among the quantum dots and over a large range of distances. Electron dynamics was calculated by multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree and is, irrespective of the large number of discrete variable representation grid points, feasible after having developed an OpenACC graphic card compilation of the program.