Abstract
We review salient features exhibited by electronic states in semiconductor superlattices subjected to a static electric field applied parallel to the growth axis. When the field is large enough the band structure is destroyed and replaced by evenly spaced levels: the Wannier-Stark ladder. The Wannier-Stark ladders are calculated to survive the broadening due to static scatterers (ionized impurities, interface defects). We briefly compare the average spatial localization of the Wannier-Stark states to their semiclassical counterpart derived from the Bloch oscillator formalism.We show that the field-induced quantization leads to an effective blue shift of the band-to-band absorption edge as well as to the existence of oscillatory structures which are periodic in 1/F.
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© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Bastard, G., Ferreira, R. (1989). Wannier-Stark Quantization and Bloch Oscillator in Biased Semiconductor Superlattices. In: Fasol, G., Fasolino, A., Lugli, P. (eds) Spectroscopy of Semiconductor Microstructures. NATO ASI Series, vol 206. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-6565-6_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-6565-6_21
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