Optical transitions in broken gap heterostructures

Abstract

We have used an eight band model to investigate the electronic structures and to calculate the optical matrix elements of InAs-GaSb broken gap semiconductor heterostructures. The unusual hybridization of the conduction band states in InAs layers with the valence band states in GaSb layers has been analyzed in details. We have studied the dependence of optical matrix elements on the degree of conduction-valence hybridization, the tuning of hybridization by varying the width of the GaSb layers and/or InAs layers, and the sensitivity of quantized levels to this tuning. Large spin-orbit splitting in energy bands has been demonstrated. Our calculation can serve as a theoretical modeling for infrared lasers based on broken gap quantum well heterostructures.