Electronic, optical, and structural properties of quantum wire superlattices on vicinal (111) GaAs substrates

We have studied corrugated quantum wells as a semiconductor quantum wire structure. The quantum well corrugation results from a step bunching effect during epitaxial growth on vicinal (111) GaAs substrates and might be used to form a quantum wire superlattice. The strain and piezoelectric effects were studied both by an atomistic valence force field method and by an elastic continuum model. Within the elastic continuum model we also studied the electromechanical coupling. The electronic band structure was calculated with the eight-band k∙p model. The nonphysical oscillating solutions were eliminated by appropriate fine tuning of the material parameters. We have also studied the density of states and the polarization dependence of interband light absorption in the electric dipole approximation.