Laser dressed donor impurities in free-standing GaAs films under an electric field

Abstract

The laser-field dependence of the shallow donor states in a free-standing thin GaAs film under an external static field is studied within the effective mass approximation. The laser dressing effects are considered for the confinement potential of the well as well as for the impurity Coulomb interaction distorted by the dielectric mismatch at interfaces. We found that (i) the increase of the laser intensity dramatically modifies the electron potential energy, which establishes the quantum confinement; (ii) the ground state subband energy is significantly enhanced by the electrostatic self-energy arising from the interaction between the electron and its images; (iii) the impurity binding is much larger than those of the dielectrically homogenous case and it becomes stronger sensitive to the laser intensity variation; (iv) under an electric field parallel to the growth direction, the inversion symmetry with respect to the quantum well center is broken and a red/blue-shift of the binding energy, depending on the impurity position along the field direction, occurs. Therefore, the shallow donor energy levels in the free-standing thin films can be tuned in a wide range by proper tailoring of the structure parameters (well size, impurity position) as well as by varying the external applied fields.