Excitons in quantum well wires: V-shaped wire, T-shaped wire and strain-induced lateral confinement

Abstract

We calculated the energy and the wave function of the exciton for i) a V-shaped quantum wire, ii) a T-shaped quantum wire and iii) a quantum wire resulting from strain-induced lateral confinement. The full Luttinger and Bir-Pikus Hamiltonian are taken into account in the three calculations. We used different parameters inside the well and at the barrier. The basis states |3/2m> are defined with respect to [110], the direction of the wire in the three kinds of structures, instead of the usual [001] direction. The hole dispersion curve allows one to define an effective mass which is to be introduced in the variational calculation of the exciton binding energy. We show that the hole is confined in a wire only in case i).