Size dependence of the carrier ground state of small semiconductor particles

Abstract

By calculating the carrier density distribution and the effective one-particle potential self-consistently, we investigate the size dependence of the carrier ground state of small spherical semiconductor particles with the doping level fixed. The particles are assumed to be in an insulating medium or in the vacuum. The prominent peak just inside the carrier-deficient surface layer in the carrier density profile persists regardless of the particle size, while, with increasing size, the oscillatory density-profile feature inside the prominent peak becomes less and less conspicuous and reduces to nearly constant density to achieve charge neutrality. The remarkable variation of the potential bending with increase of the size depends upon where the newly occupied carrier states have their probability density concentrated. This variation of the potential bending often involves the energy intersection of two close energy levels with different angular momenta l.