Collective Spontaneous Emission from a System of Quantum Dots

We study the spontaneous emission from a regular lateral array or a randomly distributed ensemble of quantum dots under strong excitation (full inversion) conditions. We focus on the similarities and differences between the cases of random and regular arrangement of the dots and show that there is very little difference between the evolution of luminescence in these two cases, both for identical dots and for a realistically inhomogeneously broadened ensemble. This means that the enhanced emission or superradiance effect is not due to accidental clustering of pairs of dots. Moreover, we point out that observation of an enhanced emission under weak excitation does not prove that true superradiance will develop in a fully inverted system.