Effects of size and shape on electronic states of quantum dots

A strain-modified, single-band, constant-potential three-dimensional model was applied to study the dependence of electronic states of InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs) of different shapes and sizes. The energy trend was found to decrease monotonically with increasing QD size (i.e.E similar to size(-gamma)) but exhibited minimum value at aspect ratio of approximately 0.5. The ground state energy for broad tip was found to be always lower than that of narrow tip. Thus, effort to alter the QD shape instead of the aspect ratio is proposed for longer wavelength emission with InAs/GaAs QDs. The energy dependency gamma for volume was found to be approximately three times smaller than that for base length and height. A method was proposed to exploit this large difference for growth experimentalists to verify if the capped InAs QDs follow similar increase as the uncapped InAs QDs upon growth parameter variation.