Abstract

Electronic properties such as the binding energy of the ground state and the excited states of impurities confined in quantum wells (QWs) have been predicted in several theoretical papers. In the original calculation by G. Bastard [1] hydrogenic impurity potentials and infinite barrier heights were used, which resulted in continuously increasing binding energies with decreasing QW width. When more realistic finite heights for the barriers were used in the calculations, it was shown that the binding energy goes through a maximum at a non-zero QW width [2,3]. Thus, there has been recent progress with respect to the theoretical aspect of this subject, but there have been few experimental demonstrations of the properties of confined impurities.

© 1989 Optical Society of America