Hydrostatic pressure and electric field effects and nonlinear optical rectification of confined excitons in spherical quantum dots

The effects of hydrostatic pressure and applied electric field on an interacting electron-hole pair in a semiparabolic quantum dot are studied under the density-matrix formalism and the effective-mass approximation. The binding energies of the first confined exciton states are calculated as a function of the confinement strength. The nonlinear optical rectification is also studied as a function of the hydrostatic pressure, the applied electric field, and the confinement strength. The results show that the resonant peak of the nonlinear optical rectification can be red or blue shifted by external probes such as hydrostatic pressure, applied electric field, and the confinement strength. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.