Shallow donor inside core/shell spherical nanodot: Effect of nanostructure size and dielectric environment on energy spectrum

We have reported the impact of the core and shell radii on the energy spectrum of centered shallow donor confined inside CdSe/ZnTe core/shell quantum dot and ZnTe/CdSe inverted core/shell quantum dot. The dielectric discontinuity between the nanosystems and their surrounding medium was considered. In order to examine the behavior of the donor binding energy as a function of the spatial parameters a variational approach within the framework of the effective-mass approximation was deployed. Our model shows that for a fixed shell radius the increase of the core radius value blue-shifts the binding energy of the donor inside inverted core/shell quantum dot only if the value of the core to shell radii ratio is between 0.9 and 1, otherwise it is red-shifted. By contrast, for core/shell quantum dot system the binding energy is red-shifted by increasing the core radius for a fixed nanostructure size and for all values of the core to shell radii ratio. We have also found that the donor binding energy values are more important in a core/shell nanodot than in an inverted core/shell quantum dot. •Theoretical model of a centered donor in core/shell nanodots.•Comparison between CdSe/ZnTe and ZnTe/CdSe structures.•Influence of the core/shell sizes and of the external dielectric constant on the binding energy.