Optical properties of semiconductor quantum structures relevant for practical applications

Three studies are described which concern optical properties of semiconductor quantum wells (QW) and quantum dots (QD) relevant for their application, especially in optoelectronic devices. The first deals with the effect of quantum confinement on electron-hole interaction and its consequent modification of the joint density of states in GaAs/Al_xGa_1-xAs QWs. The second study shows how quantum confinement further affects the anisotropic strain modified polarization properties of interband transitions in non-polar GaN QWs. The third study tries to describe how and why luminescence throughput in CdSe-ZnS core-shell QDs, which are used for luminescence imaging of biological tissues, is affected by the choice of the excitation photon energy.