Effect of charge carrier-phonon coupling on the energy of shallow donors in CdSe quantum dots

The effects of low electric field and finite-barrier height on the ground state energy of a donor impurity confined in a polar CdSe spherical quantum dot embedded in a non-polar matrix were studied. Calculations were carried out in the framework of the effective mass approximation using the Hasse variational approach. The effect of the quantum confinement was described by a finite deep potential taking into account the interactions between the charge carriers (electron and ion) and the confined longitudinal optical phonons (LO-phonons). It was found that the binding energy and the polarizability depend strongly on LO-phonon effects. So, the phonon corrections should not be ignored or neglected whatever the dot size and the degree of confinement. (C) 2003 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.