Stark effect and excitonic tunneling escape process in semiconductor quantum wells

Abstract
In this work, we have numerically integrated in space and time the effective mass Schrödinger equation for an exciton in a semiconductor quantum-well structure. Considering a Coulomb interaction between the electron-hole pair and an external electric field, we have studied the excitonic tunneling escape process from semiconductor quantum wells. Our method of calculation has been applied to types-I, -II, and -III quantum-well superlattices. In addition, we present the calculated excitonic lifetimes for the GaAs/GaAlAs, InAs/GaSb, and HgTe/HgCdTe systems under an external electric field. In the HgTe/CdTe system, the possibility of having similar electron and hole lifetime values is also found if the applied electric field is large enough.