In this article we present a unified model for studying the effect of the sizes and shapes of small semiconductor quantum dots on the electron and hole energy states. We solved the three-dimensional effective one band Schrödinger equation for semiconductor quantum dots with disk, lenticular, and conical shapes. For small InAs/GaAs quantum dots we found a substantial difference in the ground state and first excited state electron energies for dots with the same volume but different shapes.

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... on energy dependence on volume is found to be quite different from the commonly quoted V Ϫ2/3 . The exponent can vary over a wide range and depends on the dot shapes.