Spherical quantum dot under an electric field

Abstract

We investigate the effect of an electric field applied to a spherical quantum dot on the energy groundstate of carriers in the quantum dot using an infinite confining potential well model. We perform a simple variational calculation for low electric fields and we find a quadratic shift of the energy levels with the electric field while for strong fields, the Stark shift of the energy groundstate increases almost linearly with the electric field. There is a transition for quasi-one dimensional to three-dimensional behavior when the dot radius is large. The comparison of our results with previous exact calculations is very good. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)