Effects of hydrostatic pressure and electric field on the nonlinear optical rectification of strongly confined electron–hole pairs in GaAs quantum dots

Abstract

The effects of hydrostatic pressure and applied electric field on the optical properties of single electrons and interacting electron–hole pairs in semiparabolic quantum dots are studied using the density matrix formalism and the effective-mass approximation. The binding energies of the ground and the lower three excited states of confined excitons are calculated as functions of the confining potential radius (confinement strength). The nonlinear optical rectification between the ground and low-excited states is studied as a function of the hydrostatic pressure, the applied electric field, and the confinement strength. The results show that the resonant peak of the nonlinear optical rectification can be red or blue shifted by external perturbations like hydrostatic pressure, applied electric field, and the confinement strength.