In GaAs, upon substitution of the effective mass and dielectric constant, a ground-state binding energy of 4.4 meV is obtained.

This is comparable to the thermal broadening of - 4 meV produced by optical phonon scattering and inhomogeneous broadening. In other words, the exciton dissociates in a very short time and is hardly detected in the absorption spectra at room temperature, except in very pure samples. The situation is .drastically altered in a quantum well. In a single-quantum well (SQW) or multiplequantum well (MQW) with thick barriers (~ 100 A), electrons and holes are confined in the region defined by the well width, and the overlap of their wave functions is increased, This results in an increase in the oscillator strength of the inter-band transitions between the discrete electron and hole energy bound states, which are produced by the size quantization. Consequently, strong resonances corresponding to the heavy-hole and light-hole transitions are seen near the band edge of the well material even at room temperature shown in Fig are the measured and calculated absorption spectra of an Ino.53Gao.47As (100 A)IIn052AiO.48As (l00 A) MQW lattice matched to InP, in which the resonances for I = 2 and 3 are also clearly seen. It may be noted that distinct resonances are seen for heavy-hole and light-hole transitions. This is because a slitting between the HH and LH bands occurs at the zone center due to the difference i the energy eigenvalues resulting from different hole masses. Since typical well dimensions are - 100 A and the exciton diameter is ~ 300 A, there is some penetration of the exciton, wave function into the barrier rnaterial .This is depicted in Fig . In the limit, for small well widths, the situation becomes similar to a three-dimensional solid. It has been shown that for a purely two dimensional exciton, its binding energy is four times the bulk value. However, because of the extension of its wave function into the barrier, the binding energy in practical SQW and MQW structures ranges between 2Bex and 3Bex. Since this binding energy is much larger than the thermal broadening, the exciton resonances are clearly seen in the absorption spectra even at room temperature. The coefficient for inter subband absorption in a quantum well can be expressed in cgs units as

where L, is the width of the well, N2D = is the 2-D density of states, ap is a factor due to polarization dependence of the matrix elements (in GaAs ap = 1/2). This equation is valid for a single pair of conduction and valence subbands. Note also that the value of a is constant and will remain so till the next sub-band energies are reached. This is evident in .The absorption coefficient can be increased by decreasing Lz. However, as Lz is decreased, the electron and hole wave functions spread outside the well and the overlap decreases. Therefore, for every material system there is an optimum well size.

The ground-state wave functions of the electron and hole sub-band with no applied transverse field (in the direction perpendicular to the layers) are shown in Fig. .With the application of an electric field several things happen. The electron and hole wave functions are separated and pushed toward the opposite sides of the well, as shown in .The reduced overlap results in a corresponding reduction in absorption and in luminescence. The probability of carriers tunneling out of the wells also increases, resulting in a decrease in carrier lifetimes and a broadening of the absorption spectra. The transition energy is given by

where and are the electron and hole subband energies. With the application of moderate electric fields, there is little change in and a very small change in due to the Stark effect in the well material. However, due to the modification of the envelope functions, there is a reduction in and , the subband energies. This results in a shift of the absorption spectrum to lower energies, including the heavy- and light-hole resonances. The energy shift of the resonances has a quadratic dependence on the applied transverse electric field, as will be described in Chapter Il. The shift is much larger than the Stark shift in 5 bulk materials and is - 20 me V for E = 10 V/cm in a 100 A GaAs/Al0.3Ga0.7As quantum well. Experimental data are shown in Fig. and the phenomenon is known as the quantum confined Stark effect (QCSE)