ELECTRONIC LOCALIZATION AND STRESS INHOMOGENEITY - FROM QUANTUM-WELLS TO COUPLED QUANTUM WIRES AND DOTS

In the present study the effects of inhomogeneously distributed stress are demonstrated and a possible method of obtaining an extremely short range lateral localisation is described. This is achieved by the growth of strained layer tilted structures and particular use is made of the growth of very narrow quantum wells on tilted substrates which provokes non-uniform stress fields. This locally modifies the band structure and may be used to increase the confinement in quantum wells, producing coupled quantum wires and quantum dots on a very short scale. This has been carried out for InGaAs quantum wells grown on (001) GaAs substrates and two tilting directions, toward (111) and (011), have been studied.