Summary
In this Chapter, we showed that the motion of electrons in a crystal could be spatially confined in one, two or even three directions at a time by designing and fabricating an adequate semiconductor structure: a quantum well, wire or dot. When the amount of confinement is sufficient, quantum mechanical effects arise and lead to the discretization of the energy spectrum, i.e. the quantization of allowed energy levels and momenta of electrons.
The major characteristic of low dimensional quantum structures is their density of states which shows a steep dependence on energy, especially for lower dimensionality systems. The density of states is intimately related to the optical properties of a semiconductor structure, through its absorption coefficient, and therefore directly affects the characteristics of optoelectronic devices that use it.
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References
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Further reading
Ahmed, H., “An integration microfabrication system for low dimensional structures and devices,” in The Physics and Fabrication of Microstructures and Microdevices, eds. M.J. Kelly and C. Weisbuch, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 435–442, 1986.
Ashcroft, N.W. and Mermin, N.D., Solid State Physics, Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York, 1976.
Bassani, F. and Pastori Parravicini, G., Electronic States and Optical Transitions in Solids, Chp. 6, Pergamon, NewYork, 1975.
Bastard, G., Wave Mechanics Applied to Semiconductor Heterostructures, Halsted Press, New York, 1988.
Beaumont, S.P., “Quantum wires and dots—defect related effects,” Physica Scripta T45, pp. 196–199, 1992.
Dingle, R., “Confined carrier quantum states in ultrathin semiconductor heterostructures,” in Feskorperproblem, XV, ed. H.J. Queisser, pp. 21–48.
Hasko, D.G., Potts, A., Cleaver, J.R., Smith, C., and Ahmed, H., “Fabrication of sub-micrometer free standing single crystal GaAs and Si structures for quantum transport studies,” Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B. 6, pp. 1849–1851, 1988.
Scherer, A., Jewell, J., Lee, Y.H., Harbison, J., and Florez, L.T., “Fabrication of microlasers and microresonator optical switches,” Applied Physics Letters 55, pp. 2724–2726, 1989.
Tewordt, M., Law, V., Kelly, M., Newbury, R., Pepper, M., and Peacock, C., “Direct experimental determination of the tunneling time and transmission probability of electrons through a resonant tunneling system,” Journal of Physics-Condensed Matter 2, pp. 896–899, 1990.
Vasko, F.T. and Kuznetsov, A.V., Electronic States and Optical Transitions in Semiconductor Heterostructures, Springer, New York, 1999.
Weisbuch, C. and Vinter, B., Quantum Semiconductor Structures, Academic Press, New York, 1991.
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© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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(2002). Low Dimensional Quantum Structures. In: Fundamentals of Solid State Engineering. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47567-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-47567-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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