Electron energy level calculations for cylindrical narrow gap semiconductor quantum dot

Abstract

Three computational techniques are presented for approximation of the ground state energy and wave function of an electron confined by a disk-shaped InAs quantum dot (QD) embedded in GaAs matrix. The problem is treated with the effective one electronic band Hamiltonian, the energy and position dependent electron effective mass approximation, and the Ben-Daniel Duke boundary conditions. To solve the three dimensional (3D) Schrodinger equation, we employ (i) the adiabatic approximation, (ii) the adiabatic approximation with averaging, and (iii) full numerical solution. It is shown that the more efficient approximations (i) and (ii) can only be used for relatively large QD sizes. The full numerical method gives qualitative as well as quantitative trends in electronic properties with various parameters. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.