Binding energy of a screened donor in a spherical quantum dot with a parabolic potential

A wavefunction is proposed for calculating the ground-state energy of a screened donor in a spherical quantum dot under a parabolic potential by a variational method. The donor is taken to be at the center of the quantum dot. Results are presented for four values of the screening parameter by the proposed wavefunction as well as for the hydrogenic donor case by a wavefunction used by Xiao et al.. To assess the accuracy of the results, ‘exact’ energies are also obtained by numerical integration of the Schrödinger equation. It is shown that the proposed wavefunction gives very good results in all cases including the hydrogenic donor case.