Many-body effects on the ground-state energy in semiconductor quantum wells

The ground-state energy due to exchange interaction and screening of the Coulomb correlation for the electron-hole plasma in strained-layer quantum wells is examined as functions of sheet carrier density and biaxial strain. We calculate the leading-order self-energy within the full random-phase approximation for consideration of many-body effects, taking into account the valence-band non-parabolicity. We solve the Luttinger-Kohn Hamiltonian in the k.p method considering valence-band mixing to obtain the valence-band structure for the holes. It is shown that the ground-state energy strongly depends on the sheet carrier density and strain. We also see that the screening of Coulomb correlation plays an important role in determination of the ground-state energy of the strained-layer quantum wells. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.