Optical Determination of the Heavy-hole Effective Mass of (In, Ga)As/ GaAs Quantum Wells

Abstract

We determine the reduced mass of heavy-hole exciton and the heavy-hole in-plane mass for a series of (In, Ga)As/GaAs strained layer quantum wells using the magnetoluminescence measurements of the exciton ground state and the modified perturbation approach. In the theoretical calculation of the magnetoexciton ground state, the exciton reduced mass is considered as an adjustable parameter, and two variation parameters are used in the unperturbed wave function which is expressed in terms of subband wave functions in the growth axis and the product of two-dimensional hydrogen and oscillatorlike wave functions for the in-plane component. We take into account the energy dependence of transverse and in-plane electron masses in the two-band effective mass approximation. The electron effective mass decreases as either quantum-well width or indium composition increases, and so does the heavy-hole in-plane mass down to the value at the decoupling limit (mhh, p = 0.11m0).