Electron-phonon interactions and excitonic dephasing in semiconductor nanocrystals

The size dependence of the contribution to the excitonic dephasing rate in semiconductor nanocrystals is clarified for various electron-phonon coupling mechanisms. On the basis of these dependencies, the commonly observed linearly temperature-dependent term of the excitonic dephasing rate and the proportionality of its magnitude to the inverse square of the nanocrystal size are attributed to pure dephasing due to deformation-potential coupling. The calculated coefficients of the linearly temperature-dependent term are quantitatively in good agreement with the experimental results on CdSe and CuCl nanocrystals.