摘要
In this paper we analyze a long standing problem of the appearance of spurious,non-physical solutions arising in the application of the effective mass theory to low dimensional nanostructures.The theory results in a system of coupled eigenvalue PDEs that is usually supplemented by interface boundary conditions that can be derived from a variational formulation of the problem.We analyze such a system for the envelope functions and show that a failure to restrict their Fourier expansion coeffi-cients to small k components would lead to the appearance of non-physical solutions.We survey the existing methodologies to eliminate this difficulty and propose a simple and effective solution.This solution is demonstrated on an example of a two-band model for both bulk materials and low-dimensional nanostructures.Finally,based on the above requirement of small k,we derive a model for nanostructures with cylindrical symmetry and apply the developed model to the analysis of quantum dots using an eight-band model.
