Stark effect in colloidal indium arsenide nanocrystal quantum dots: consequences for wave function mapping experiments

The influence of the tip-substrate bias induced electrical field in a scanning tunneling spectroscopy experiment on colloidal InAs nanocrystals has been studied. Calculating the Stark induced splitting of the degenerate 1P_e state perturbatively within a particle-in-a-sphere model, revealed a possible explanation of recently published experimental wave function mapping data by Millo et al. (Ref. 1).