Valence band mixing of cubic GaN/AlN quantum dots

Abstract

We study the spin purity of the hole ground state in nearly axially symmetric GaN/AlN quantum dots (QDs). To this end, we develop a six-band Burt-Foreman Hamiltonian describing the valence band structure of zinc blende nanostructures with cylindrical symmetry and calculate the effects of eccentricity variationally. We show that the aspect ratio is a key factor for spin purity. In typical QDs with small aspect ratio the ground state is essentially a heavy hole (HH) whose spin purity is even higher than that of InGaAs QDs of similar sizes. When the aspect ratio increases, mixing with light-hole (LH) and split-off (SO) subbands becomes important and, additionally, the ground state becomes sensitive to QD anisotropy, which further enhances the mixing. We finally show that, despite the large GaN hole effective mass, an efficient magnetic modulation is feasible in QDs with aspect ratio ~1, which can be used to modify the ground state symmetry and hence the optical spectrum properties.