Model Effective‐Mass Hamiltonians for Abrupt Degraded Heterojunctions

A class of hermitian effective‐mass Hamiltonians is considered whose kinetic energy term is 1/4 ( m α pm β pm γ + m γ pm β pm α ) with α + β + γ = −1. These Hamiltonians are applied to abrupt degraded interfaces between crystals and the matching conditions across the interface are searched for the effective‐mass wave function Ψ and its spatial derivative Ψ′. For α ≠ γ it is found that the ground‐state energy is negative, i.e. without physical bearing for the considered potential. Consequently, the only viable cases are for α = γ. In a model calculation, β ≈ −1 is estimated, to be the more relevant candidate although the case β = 0 cannot be excluded for typical interfaces.