Absorption coefficient in periodic InAs/GaAs nanostructures

Periodic nanostructure manufacture has been proposed as a procedure for obtaining new materials with tunable physical properties, such as the photon absorption coefficient. In this work we have theoretically investigated this quantity in ordered InAs/GaAs cubic quantum dot systems. We solved the Schrödinger equation associated with these structures, using a set of 13×13×13 plane waves at 12,167 equally spaced points of the Q space. We focused on the transitions between minibands arising from the conduction band. We took into account the different effective masses in each material. We included the effects of the strain by taking a conduction band offset of 0.5 eV, corresponding to strained InAs in GaAs