Scaling of multiexciton lifetimes in semiconductor nanocrystals

Ultrafast multiexciton decay via Auger recombination is a major impediment for prospective applications of semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) in lasing and solar cells enabled by carrier multiplication. One important unexplored aspect of Auger recombination is the scaling of multiexciton lifetimes with the number of excitons per NC. To address this question, we analyze multiexciton dynamics in PbSe and CdSe NCs. We observe that these two systems show a distinct difference in scaling of multiexciton lifetimes, which can be explained in terms of a difference in symmetries of high-order multiexcitons resulting from significant disparity in degeneracies of the lowest-energy quantized states.