Tunneling of heavy holes in semiconductor microstructures

We use a six-band effective-mass theory to calculate the rate of tunneling of heavy holes in two kinds of GaAs/AlAs semiconductor microstructure: a mu ltiple-quantum-well system with alternating wide and narrow quantum wells a nd, for comparison, a double-barrier structure. Our results take account of valence-band mixing induced by confinement of the carriers and for the two structures considered are obtained from effective-mass generalizations of, respectively, Bardeen's transfer-Hamiltonian method and Gamow's method for resonant states. After correcting for uncertainties in the band-structure p arameters, we find good agreement with time-resolved photoluminescence expe riments on the multiple-quantum-well structure. [S0163-1829(99)06304-3].