Optical absorption coefficient of a hydrogenic impurity in a surface quantum well

In this study, the first excited state binding energy and the linear, non-linear and total optical absorption coefficients (OAC) of a hydrogenic impurity in a surface quantum well (SQW) of the type vacuum/GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs are calculated as functions of the incident photon energy, the Al content and the well width using a variational method within the effective mass approximation. The results show that the first excited state energy and the linear, non-linear and total OAC are strongly influenced by variations in the well width, and only a slight, yet interesting, impact of the Al content is observed. A redshift in the extreme values of the linear, non-linear and total OAC is found for a SQW with fixed Al content and variable width, whereas no significant variation is observed in the reciprocal system of fixed width and variable Al content.