Energy dependence of electron effective mass and effect of wave function confinement in a nanoscale In0.53Ga0.47As/In 0.52Al0.48As quantum well

Abstract

The effective mass in the conduction band was analyzed as a function of the kinetic energy in a 5-20 nm-thick In0.53Ga0.47As/In 0.52Al0.48As quantum well (QW). An increase in the effective mass caused by wave function confinement in the QW, which was previously proposed theoretically, was not found to be present in this material under the framework of the energy effective mass. In the direction normal to the QW plane, the mass determined by the interband optical transition at 100-300 K fitted well with the calculated result based on Kane's bulk band theory. In a direction parallel to the QW plane, the cyclotron resonance energy at less than 70 T and the magneto photoluminescence energy at less than 13 T fitted with the calculated result to within an error range of ±2 meV. In the analysis of the magneto-photoluminescence at 1.4 K, the bandgap renormalization was determined and large new peaks appeared above 8 T, possibly because of the interaction of the magneto-exciton states with the ground-state zero-dimensional Landau level. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.