Simplified treatment of many-body effects in the intersubband absorption of symmetric uniformly doped quantum wells at zero temperature

We present a simplified calculation of the intersubband absorption in symmetric, uniformly doped quantum wells at zero temperature, which takes into account conduction-band nonparabolicity (via an energy-dependent effective mass) and treats all effects (including the direct Coulomb, exchange, depolarization, and excitonlike) on an equal footing. There is no need to solve self-consistent equations (i.e., Hartree or Hartree-Fock) in our method and we obtain our results without recourse to advanced many-body techniques; yet we still find good agreement with experiments. We examine in particular the effect of conduction-band nonparabolicity on the peak absorption energy. Our results should therefore be of particular interest to experimentalists seeking to model their results.