Abstract
Recently, considerable attention has been drawn to the novel electrooptical properties of semiconductor superlattices (SLs) under an electric field.1-3 The resonant coupling of quantum wells (QWs) in a SL forms minibands from the discrete QW energy levels. When an electric level F is applied along the growth direction, this resonant coupling is reduced as the energy levels in consecutive QWs become misaligned by an energy qFd, where d is the SL period, and the eigenstates localize over a few adjacent QWs. This is called Wannier-Stark localization and gives rise to a change of absorption from that of a miniband profile to a sharp QW excitonic shape. An effective blue shift of the absorption edge is, therefore, predicted,1 because the SL band gap is smaller than that of the isolated QW level by the half sum 1/2 (BWe + BWh) of the related conduction BWe and valence BWh miniband widths.
© 1990 Optical Society of America
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