  A variational calculation of the ground-state energy of neutral excitons and
of positively and negatively charged excitons (trions) confined in a
single-quantum well is presented. We study the dependence of the correlation
energy and of the binding energy on the well width and on the hole mass. The
conditional probability distribution for positively and negatively charged
excitons is obtained, providing information on the correlation and the charge
distribution in the system. A comparison is made with available experimental
data on trion binding energies in GaAs-, ZnSe-, and CdTe-based quantum well
structures, which indicates that trions become localized with decreasing
quantum well width.
