The effect of the electron-phonon interaction on the binding energy of hydrogen impurities in a quantum well

Abstract

The authors use the method suggested by Huybrechts (1978) to study a bound polaron in a three-dimensional polar crystal. They assume the walls of the quantum well to be infinitely high and choose the variational wavefunction to be that used by Bastard (1981) in a study of the states of shallow donors in a quantum well. They investigate the effect of the interaction of electrons with phonons (the phonons include bulk longitudinal optical phonons and surface optical phonons) on the binding energy of shallow donors confined in a quantum well. They find that the effect of polarons increases the binding energy of shallow donors. For the GaAs-Ga1-xAlxAs quantum well, when the L/a0 ratio (where L is the width and a0 the effective Bohr radius) is decreased from 4 to 1, the binding energy increases from 0.3 to 1.3 meV.