Direct pseudopotential calculation of exciton Coulomb and exchange energies in semiconductor quantum dots

The effects of electron-hole interaction on the exciton energy of semiconductor quantum dots are calculated using pseudopotential wave functions. A comparison with the widely used, but never tested, effective-mass approximation (EMA) shows that the electron-hole Coulomb energy is significantly (similar to 40%) overestimated by the EMA, and that the scaling with the dot size R is sublinear in 1/R. The exchange splitting is much smaller than the Coulomb energy, and in the case of CdSe quantum dots shows significant deviations from the 1/R(3) scaling predicted by the EMA.