Enhanced many-body effects in 2- and 1-dimensional ZnO structures: A Green's function perturbation theory study

In order to study many-body effects in ZnO structures with reduced-dimensionality, electronic and optical absorption properties of ZnO monolayer and armchair ZnO nanoribbons (AZnONRs) are studied by means of Green's function perturbation theory using the GW+Bethe-Salpeter equation approach. In both ZnO monolayer and AZnONRs, as a consequence of enhanced quantum confinement, the quasi-particle corrections are significant and the optical absorption properties are dominated by strong excitonic effects with considerable binding energies (1-2 eV) assigned to the lowest-energy bound excitons. It reveals that inclusion of excitonic effects, which are neglected in calculations at single-particle approximation, is crucial to qualitatively and quantitatively describe the optical properties of such materials with reduced-dimensionality. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.