Disorder of a GaAs-AlGaAs Quantum Well as a Technique For Fabricating Quantum Wires

Submicron bandgap tailoring of semiconductors has many exciting applications such as optical waveguiding and carrier confinement. When the carriers are confined to dimensions comparable to their deBroglie wavelength, they exhibit quantum size effects [1,2,3]. Techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy of GaAs-AlGaAs structures allow for such tailoring in one dimension, but control in the other two dimensions requires other techniques. Most of the work toward lateral confinement of carriers to these dimensions has focused on etching techniques [1,3] due to the lack of other methods for creating such small structures. For most device applications, however, a lateral confining structure which does not create an exposed surface is essential. One such technique is the use of ion implantation to selectively disorder a quantum well [2].