Reduced mass of an exciton in a monolayer-wide-InAs/GaAs quantum well from magnetophotoluminescence measurements

Magnetophotoluminescence experiments were conducted on samples consisting of nominally one-monolayer-wide InAs quantum wells (QWs) with GaAs barriers grown on (001) substrate. From these measurements, we have for the first time deduced the reduced mass of the exciton associated with the InAs QW. The reduced mass is found to be lower than that predicted theoretically using bulk effective masses, the reduction probably arising from a reduction in InAs heavy-hole mass due to heavy- and light-hole subband mixing in the QW.