Optical absorption of conduction electrons in semiconductor nanowires in the presence of the electron-phonon interaction

Abstract We calculate the energy states and the optical absorption coefficient for electrons in a nanowire in the presence of the Rashba and the longitudinal-optical phonon interactions. The interplay of those interactions results in a splitting in the electron dispersion relation at zero wavevector that grows linearly for the ground state as the strength of the lateral quantum confinement increases. For higher states, the energy splitting increases more rapidly till the state of resonant polaron is reached, then it increases slowly due to the pinning effect. The frequency separation between the well-resolved absorption peaks and their number are greatly influenced by the state of the polarons.