Title: Effect of conduction band non-parabolicity on the donor states in zinc-blende GaN/AlGaN quantum dot

Authors: M. Revathi; A. John Peter

Addresses: Department of Physics, Yadava College Govindarajan Campus, Thiruppalai, Madurai 625 014, Tamil Nadu, India. ' Department of Physics, Government Arts and Science College, Melur-625 106, India

Abstract: Donor binding energies of a hydrogenic impurity in a zinc-blende (ZB) GaN/Al_xGa_1-xN quantum dot are investigated. We have applied the variational method using 1s-hydrogenic wave-function in the framework of the single band effective mass approximation with two-parametric wave-function. The barrier height and the mass variation of AlGaN barrier are found out for different Al content in the dot. The calculations have been carried out with the inclusion of conduction band non-parabolicity using the Luttinger-Kohn model which introduces additional energy in the Hamiltonian. The numerical results show that the: 1) binding energy increases as the dot radius decreases for all Al content; 2) binding energy increases with the Al content for all the dot radii; 3) the inclusion of non-parabolic effects leads to more binding for all the values of dot radius and is significant for narrow wells. These results are compared with the other existing available literature.

Keywords: quantum dots; QDs; hydrogenic impurity; donor binding; nanotechnology; conduction bands; non-parabolicity; binding energy; aluminium; zinc; gallium nitride; narrow wells.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNP.2012.044493

International Journal of Nanoparticles, 2012 Vol.5 No.1, pp.7 - 15

Received: 07 Jun 2010
Accepted: 06 Jan 2011
Published online: 20 Aug 2014 *

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