Valence-band effective-potential evolution for coupled holes

We present the metamorphosis in the effective-potential profile of layered heterostructures, for several III-V semiconductor binary compounds, when the band mixing of light and heavy holes increases. A root-locus-like procedure is directly applied to an eigenvalue quadratic problem obtained from a multichannel system of coupled modes, in the context of the multiband effective mass approximation. By letting grow valence-band mixing, it is shown that the standard fixed-height rectangular potential energy for the scatterer distribution is a reliable test-run input for heavy holes. On the contrary, this scheme is no longer valid for light holes and a mutable effective band offset profile has to be considered instead whenever the in-plane kinetic energy changes. (C) 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim