Computational improvement of the normalized plane-wave method and its applications in quantum dot studies

In this work we present an improvement on the normalized plane-wave method, for use in studies on carrier confinement in quantum dots. This alternative approach has two main advantages: it noticeably increases the accuracy of the calculations by removing the barrier surrounding the dot under study and it dramatically decreases the computation times. As we will demonstrate, this new approach is obtained from a simple analysis of the calculations.We use this algorithm to study hole confinement in spherical Si quantum dots, and from it we propose a correction to the Effective Mass approach to be used in Si quantum dot simulations. With this technique we obtained results comparable to those calculated by the Tight-Binding method but using less computational resources.