Nanoplatelets as material system between strong confinement and weak confinement

Recently, the fabrication of CdSe nanoplatelets became an important research topic. Nanoplatelets are often described as having a similar electronic structure as two-dimensional quantum wells and are promoted as colloidal quantum wells with monolayer precision width. In this paper we show that nanoplatelets are not ideal quantum wells, but cover depending on the size: the strong confinement regime, an intermediate regime, and a Coulomb dominated regime. Thus, nanoplatelets are an ideal platform to study the physics in these regimes. Therefore, the exciton states of the nanoplatelets are numerically calculated by solving the full four-dimensional Schrödinger equation. We compare the results with approximate solutions from semiconductor quantum well and quantum dot theory. The paper can also act as review of these concepts for the colloidal nanoparticle community.