Eur. Phys. J. B 49, 415-420 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00093-1

Electronic structure of ZnO wurtzite quantum wires

Chinese Center of Advanced Science and Technology (World Laboratory), Beijing, 100080, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a zhxw99@semi.ac.cn

Received: 1 December 2005
Revised: 24 January 2006
Published online: 31 March 2006

Abstract

The electronic structure and optical properties of ZnO wurtzite quantum wires with radius R≥3 nm are studied in the framework of six-band effective-mass envelope function theory. The hole effective-mass parameters of ZnO wurtzite material are calculated by the empirical pseudopotential method. It is found that the electron states are either two-fold or four-fold degenerate. There is a dark exciton effect when the radius R of the ZnO quantum wires is in the range of [3,19.1] nm (dark range in our model). The dark ranges of other wurtzite semiconductor quantum wires are calculated for comparison. The dark range becomes smaller when the |Δ_so| is larger, which also happens in the quantum-dot systems. The linear polarization factor of ZnO quantum wires is larger when the temperature is higher.