  Epitaxially-grown semiconductor heterostructures give the possibility to
tailor the potential landscape for the carriers in a very controlled way. In
planar lattice-matched heterostructures, the potential has indeed a very simple
and easily predictable behavior: it is constant everywhere except at the
interfaces where there is a step (discontinuity) which only depends on the
composition of the semiconductors in contact. In this paper, we show that this
universally accepted picture can be invalid in nanoscale heterostructures
(e.g., quantum dots, rods, nanowires) which can be presently fabricated in a
large variety of forms. Self-consistent tight-binding calculations applied to
systems containing up to 75 000 atoms indeed demonstrate that the potential may
have a more complex behavior in axial hetero-nanostructures: The band edges can
show significant variations far from the interfaces if the nanostructures are
not capped with a homogeneous shell. These results suggest new strategies to
engineer the electronic properties of nanoscale objects, e.g. for sensors and
photovoltaics.
