Electronic Structure of the Superatom

Abstract

Semiconductor microfabrication technology has seen a series of revolutionary innovations in the past decade and has reached the point where it no longer seems fanciful to discuss ‘single atom manipulation’. Such single atom manipulation techniques will make it possible to realize various new semiconductor structures which are not possible with conventional fabrication techniques. This situation motivated one of the authors (H.W.) to propose recently a new spherically symmetric modulation-doped heterostructure named superatom[1,2]. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the general features of the electronic structure of superatoms on the basis of a self-consistent local-density-functional calculation[3].