Electronic properties of compositionally disordered quantum wires

Abstract

Electronic states in quantum wires are studied using computer simulations of the growth to characterize the compositional disorder and a tight-binding Hamiltonian to determine the electronic densities of states. Calculations for monolayer slices of wires generated from the statistics of the simulated wires reveal the degrding effect of interface profile fluctuations and islands on the ideal quasi-one-dimensional electronic characteristics. Fixed-width fluctuations of the wire profiles, on the other hand have had a relatively minor effect on the first few subbands. Calculations of the localization length are used to characterize the mobility within the quantum wires.