Impurity-related electronic properties in quantum dots under electric and magnetic fields**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 10674040) and the Natural Science Foundationof Hebei Province, China (Grant No. A2007000233).

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic study of the ground-state binding energies of a hydrogenic impurity in quantum dots subjected to external electric and magnetic fields. The quantum dot is modeled by superposing a lateral parabolic potential, a Gaussian potential and the energies are calculated via the finite-difference method within the effective-mass approximation. The variation of the binding energy with the lateral confinement, external field, position of the impurity, and quantum-size is studied in detail. All these factors lead to complicated binding energies of the donor, and the following results are found: (1) the binding energies of the donor increase with the increasing magnetic strength and lateral confinement, and reduce with the increasing electric strength and the dot size; (2) there is a maximum value of the binding energies as the impurity placed in different positions along the z direction; (3) the electric field destroys the symmetric behaviour of the donor binding energies as the position of the impurity.