  The growth-diection quantization of confined electron gas in a GaAs/AlGaAs
based quantum well structure is obtained in the Kohn-Sham iterative
computational scheme. The longitudinal conductance at low temperatures, in the
presence of magnetic field applied in the same direction, is studied to confirm
the presence of the bound-states obtained through this scheme. The sub-band
absorption is calculated by a frequently used approximation modeling the
absorption as a convolution between spectral functions. The absorption
coefficient is used to obtain photovoltaic performance related parameters of a
quantum well solar cell. When compared to a device without the quantum wells,
it is found that the additional carrier generation in the wells due to
extension of absorption edge into longer wavelengths brings about moderate
enhancement in the values of these parameters.
