Interface polarons in a heterojunction with triangular bending-band

Abstract:

The interface polaron states in a heterojunction are discussed by considering an energy-band bending near the interface and the influence of an image potential. The ground state energy and the effective mass of a polaron are variationally calculated. The numerical results for the GaAs/ \(\)\(\) heterojunction are given. It is shown that even though the influences from bulk longitudinal optical (LO) phonons are more important for the heterojunctions with lower Al composition, the contributions from two branches of interface optical (IO) phonons are not negligible. For the heterojunctions with higher Al composition, both the influences from LO phonons and two branches of IO phonons are important. The band-bending plays an important role for the interface localization of polarons, but the influence of the image potential is not essential.