Cylindrical coordinate representation for multiband Hamiltonians

Abstract

Rotationally invariant combinations of the Brillouin zone-center Bloch functions are used as basis function to express in cylindrical coordinates the valence-band and Kane envelope-function Hamiltonians for wurtzite and zinc-blende semiconductor heterostructures. For cylindrically symmetric systems, this basis allows to treat the envelope functions as eigenstates of the operator of projection of total angular momentum on the symmetry axis, with the operator's eigenvalue conventionally entering the Hamiltonians as a parameter. Complementing the Hamiltonians with boundary conditions for the envelope functions on the symmetry axis, we present for the first time a complete formalism for efficient modeling and description of multiband electron states in low-dimensional semiconductor structures with cylindrical symmetry. To demonstrate the potency of the cylindrical symmetry approximation and establish a criterion of its applicability for actual structures, we map the ground and several excited valence-band states in an isolated wurtzite GaN quantum wire of a hexagonal cross-section to the states in an equivalent quantum wire of a circular cross-section.

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References in corpus (5)

• Quantum Computation with Quantum Dots
• Consistent set of band parameters for the group-III nitrides AlN, GaN, and InN
• Spin orbit coupling in bulk ZnO and GaN
• A comparison of atomistic and continuum theoretical approaches to determine electronic properties of GaN/AlN quantum dots
• Multiband effective bond-orbital model for nitride semiconductors with wurtzite structure