Effect of Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the ground state energy of a D < sup > 0 < /sup > centre in a GaAs quantum dot with Gaussian confinement

Abstract

The ground state energy of a neutral hydrogenic donor impurity (D0) trapped in a three-dimensional GaAs quantum dot with Gaussian confinement is calculated in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction. The effect of the spin-orbit interaction is incorporated by performing a unitary transformation and retaining terms up to quadratic in the spin-orbit interaction coefficient. For the resulting Hamiltonian, the Rayleigh-Ritz variational method is employed with a simple wave function within the framework of effective-mass envelope function theory to determine the ground state energy and the binding energy of the donor complex. The results show that the Rashba spin-orbit interaction reduces the total GS energy of the donor impurity.