Designed emitter states in resonant tunneling through quantum dots

Resonant tunneling through a single layer of self-assembled quantum dots (QDs) is compared to tunneling through two layers of vertically aligned (stacked) dots. The difference can be viewed as going from a two-dimensional emitter to a zero-dimensional emitter. The temperature dependence of current peaks originating in tunneling through individual QDs and individual stacks is used to clarify this point. In addition, we show that the statistical size distribution of self-assembled quantum dots causing the inhomogeneous broadening in luminescence experiments can be analyzed in a resonant tunneling experiment.