Numerical simulation of electronic properties of coupled quantum dots on wetting layers

Self-assembled quantum dots are grown on wetting layers and frequently in an array-like assembly of many similar but not exactly equal dots. Nevertheless, most simulations disregard these structural conditions and restrict themselves to simulating a pure single quantum dot. For reasons of numerical efficiency we advocate the effective one-band Hamiltonian with energy- and position-dependent effective mass approximation and a finite height hard-wall 3D confinement potential for computation of the energy levels of the electrons in the conduction band. Within this model we investigate the geometrical effects mentioned above on the electronic structure of a pyramidal InAs quantum dot embedded in a GaAs matrix. We find that the presence of a wetting layer may affect the electronic structure noticeably. Furthermore, we establish that, in spite of the large bandgap of the InAs/GaAs heterostructure, if the dots in a vertically aligned array are sufficiently close stacked there is considerable interaction between their eigenfunctions. Moreover, the eigenfunctions of such an array are quite sensitive to certain structural perturbations.