Excitonic effects on the second-order nonlinear optical properties of semi-spherical quantum dots

Abstract

We study the excitonic effects on the second-order nonlinear optical properties of semi-spherical quantum dots considering, on the same footing, the confinement potential of the electron-hole pair and the Coulomb interaction between them. The exciton is confined in a semi-spherical geometry by means of a three-dimensional semi-parabolic potential. We calculate the optical rectification and second harmonic generation coefficients for two different values of the confinement frequency based on the numerically computed energies and wavefunctions of the exciton. We present the results as a function of the incident photon energy for GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots ranging from few nanometers to tens of nanometers. We find that the second-order nonlinear coefficients exhibit not only a blue-shift of the order of meV but also a change of intensity compared with the results obtained ignoring the Coulomb interaction in the so-called strong-confinement limit.