Donor electron in a quantum well under the influence of an electric field

Abstract

The ionization energies and the polarizabilities of a donor in an isolated well of a quasi two dimensional (Q2D) GaAs/Ga_1−x Al _x As heterostructure have been obtained for different well widths including electron-lattice coupling. A wave function that properly reduces to the hydrogenic function in the limiting case has been used. For fields of the order of 10⁵ V/m, the ionization energies decrease slightly with electric fields for all well widths (10 nm to 50 nm) studied. Also for a given electric field, as the well width increases, the ionization energy decreases. For fields of the order of 10⁷ V/m and for smaller well widths (<10 nm), the ionization energy generally increases with electric field. The results also show that for electric fields of this order, no donor bound state associated with the lowest subband is possible for well widths greater than 20 nm. The polarizabilities estimated using the expression for the dipole operator show that as the well width increases, the polarizability values also increase and do not show any abnormal behaviour.