Photoreflectance spectroscopy has been applied to investigate MBE grow
n GaAs/AlGaAs low dimension structures. The first is an HEMT type stru
cture with buried 10 periods of 2.5 nm GaAs/2.5 nm AlGaAs superlattice
. Oscillation-like signals associated with this SL have been observed
and analysed in terms of the Franz-Keldysh oscillations (FKO) related
to the presence of free carriers in the miniband structure. On the bas
is of these FKO we have evaluated the electric field in the SL region
of the structure. This value is almost identical to the value obtained
from FKO for the GaAs channel. The second structure, consisting of a
sequence of 10 quantum wells, differs in the width of well from 3 up t
o 30 monolayers (ML) and with the same barrier thickness (96 ML). For
the PR spectra at 300 K and 90 K, transitions in almost all wells have
been observed. Energies of the observed transitions are in good agree
ment with the results of numerical calculations, based on the envelope
function approximation for rectangular wells. Transitions associated
with above barrier states of amplitude comparable to the transitions i
nvolving only bound states are also observed in our PR spectra. (C) 19
97 Elsevier Science Ltd.