Exciton Coulomb correlations in axially symmetric II-VI nanocrystals

Abstract

Because of their conveniently tunable optoelectronic properties, semiconductor nanocrystals have become established components for new devices and emergent technologies, in a broad range of applications which include agriculture, medicine, energy harvesting and quantum information. In this work we study the dielectric and quantum confinement effects on excitons confined in single axially symmetric quantum dots, and systematically calculate by means of the configuration interaction method the corresponding Coulomb correlations in the cases of CdSe, CdTe and ZnTe nanocrystals. % to quantify the effects on the system energy due to the Coulomb interaction. We show that effects from the dielectric confinement, although one order of magnitude bigger than those from the quantum confinement, are negligible in the exciton energies because of mutual cancellation of the electron and hole contributions. Regarding the electrostatic interaction, we found for all analyzed cases that the exciton binding energy is below 2\% of the non-interacting electron-hole pair energy. Furthermore, our calculations reveal that the in general the first-order-perturbation correction accounts for 70 \% to 90 \% of the binding energy. These results provide useful information on the magnitude of the confinement effects in II-VI semiconductor nanocrystals, suggesting that a simple perturbative approach may be accurate enough for including the electrostatic interaction in most cases.