Valence-band effective-potential evolution for coupled holes

Abstract: We present the metamorphosis in the effective-potential profile of layered heterostructures, for several III-V semiconductor binary compounds, when the band mixing of light and heavy holes increases. A root-locus-like procedure, is directly applied to an eigenvalue quadratic problem obtained from a multichannel system of coupled modes, in the context of multiband effective mass approximation. By letting grow valence-band mixing, it is shown the standard fixed-height rectangular potential-energy for the scatterer distribution, to be a reliable test-run input for heavy holes. On the contrary, this scheme is no longer valid for light holes and a mutable effective \emph{band offset} profile has to be considered instead, whenever the in-plane kinetic energy changes.