Virtual crystal description of III-V semiconductor alloys in the tight binding approach

We propose a simple and effective approach to construct the empirical tight-binding parameters of ternary alloys in the virtual crystal approximation. This combines a new, compact formulation of the strain parameters and a linear interpolation of the Hamiltonians of binary materials strained to the alloy equilibrium lattice parameter. We show that it is possible to obtain a perfect description of the bandgap bowing of ternary alloys in the InGaAsSb family of materials. Furthermore, this approach is in a good agreement with supercell calculations using the same set of parameters. This scheme opens a way for atomistic modeling of alloy-based quantum wells and quantum wires without extensive supercell calculations.