Optical properties of impurity-bound polaron in a parabolic quantum dot

Abstract

The linear and nonlinear optical properties of an electron, which is bounded to a Coulomb impurity in a polar semiconductor quantum dot with parabolic confinement in both two and three dimensions, are studied by using the Landau–Pekar variational method and the compact density-matrix approach. With typical semiconducting GaAs-based materials, the linear, third-order nonlinear, total optical absorption coefficients and refractive indexes have been examined. We find that the all absorption spectra and refractive index changes are strongly affected by the electron–LO–phonon interaction. The results also indicate that the polaron effect increases with decreasing dimensionality of a quantum dot.