Bandgap renormalization and excitonic binding in T-shaped quantum wires

Abstract

We calculate the electronic structure for a modulation doped and gated T-shaped quantum wire using density functional theory. We calculate the bandgap renormalization as a function of the density of conduction band electrons, induced by the donor layer and/or the gate, for the translationally invariant wire, incorporating all growth and geometric properties of the structure completely. We show that most of the bandgap renormalization arises from exchange-correlation effects, but that a small shift also results from the difference of wave function evolution between electrons and holes. We calculate the binding energy of excitons in the wire, which breaks translational invariance, using a simpler, cylindrical model of the wire. For a single hole and a one dimensional electron gas of density n_e, screening of the exciton binding energy is shown to approximately compensate for bandgap renormalization, suggesting that the recombination energy remains approximately constant with n_e, in agreement with experiment. We find that the nature of screening, as treated within our non-linear model, is significantly different from that of the various linear screening treatments, and the orthogonality of free carrier states with the bound electron states has a profound effect on the screening charge. We find that the electron and hole remain bound for all densities up to about 3 x 10^6 cm^{-1} and that, as n_e increases from zero, trion and even ``quadron'' formation becomes allowed.