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Effect of anharmonicity of the strain energy on band offsets in semiconductor nanostructures

Olga L. Lazarenkova, Paul von Allmen, Fabiano Oyafuso, Seungwon Lee, Gerhard Klimeck

cond-mat.mtrl-sciarXiv:cond-mat/0405627

Abstract

Anharmonicity of the inter-atomic potential is taken into account for the quantitative simulation of the conduction and valence band offsets for highly-strained semiconductor heterostructures. The anharmonicity leads to a weaker compressive hydrostatic strain than that obtained with the commonly used quasi-harmonic approximation of the Keating model. Inclusion of the anharmonicity in the simulation of strained InAs/GaAs nanostructures results in an improvement of the electron band offset computed on an atomistic level by up to 100 meV compared to experiment.

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