Pressure Tuning of Many-Electron Impurity Interactions in Confined Semiconductor Structures

We report studies of the free carrier and donor-bound FIR excitations of a confined electron gas in modulation doped GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells (QW) as a function of the QW electron density. Applied pressure is used to tune the electron density via the G±X well±barrier crossover. As electrons are removed from the QWs, we observe successively the quenching of cyclotron resonance, the evolution of the D singlet-like magnetoplasmon resonance into the D singlet transition of isolated donors, and the emergence of the neutral donor D 1s±2p‡ line. Calculations predict a sharp drop in the QW electron density for 2.3 to 3.1 GPa, in accordance with experiment. A rapid decrease with B-field in the blue shift of the magnetoplasmon resonance at 2.2 GPa in one sample shows that pressure has shifted the n < 1 filling-factor regime to a factor-of-two lower field.