Efficient Evaluation of Absorption Coefficients for Biased Quantum-well Infrared Photodetectors

We evaluate the absorption coefficients for biased GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well structures. Adopting the box-type normalization instead of the periodic boundary conditions, we could reduce the computational time by more than a factor of 100, while maintaining the same level of numerical accuracies. With this efficiency, we tested various device parameters with different biases, which are hardly obtainable when using a previous method, and found a blue-shift of the absorption peak as the bias was increased. We also revealed the existence of an optimum bias for the maximum absorption of light from this calculation. KCI Citation Count: 1