Path-integral approach for electron-phonon interaction effects in harmonic quantum dots

Abstract

We use the Feynman-Haken path-integral formalism to obtain the polaronic correction to the ground state energy of an electron in a polar semiconductor quantum dot with parabolic confinement in both two and three dimensions. We perform calculations for the entire range of the electron-phonon coupling parameter and for arbitrary confinement length. We apply our results to several semiconductor quantum dots and show that the polaronic effect in some of these dots can be considerably large if the dot sizes are made smaller than a few nanometers.