Optical investigation of confinement and strain effects in CdTe/(CdMg)Te quantum wells

Abstract

We present optical investigations on CdTe/(CdMg)Te single quantum wells (QWs) and demonstrate the high structural quality of the pseudomorphic grown QWs structure which shows high photoluminescence efficiency up to room temperature. Due to the large band-gap difference between CdTe and Cd0.51Mg0.49Te of more than 0.8 eV remarkable strong confinement effects are observable. A strong enhancement of the exciton binding energies is found by decreasing well width. In the 50-Å-wide QW the binding energy is more than two times larger compared with that of bulk CdTe. In addition, a strong functional dependence of the localization energy of donor bound excitons on the well thickness is found. A valence-band offset of 30% in the strain-free limit is determined from the energy difference between heavy- and light-hole excitons which is consistent with the strong blue shift of exciton energies by decreasing well widths and the observed effective electron-hole confinement.