Effect of temperature on the binding energy of excited states in a ridge quantum wire

In this paper, we study the influence of temperature on the binding energy of a hydrogenic donor impurity in a ridge quantum wire using a variational procedure within the effective mass approximation. We calculate the binding energy of the donor impurity in its ground state and first few excited states in a V-groove GaAs/Ga1-xAlxAs quantum wire for various impurity positions and different temperatures. We find that the temperature and impurity locations can have important effect in the binding energy of the donor impurity. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.