Monte Carlo Study of Hot Electron Transport in GaAs-AlGaAs Quantum Wells

Abstract

The rapid advancement of epitaxial growth technology for semiconductor compounds has resulted in a host of new device possibilities in which spatial dimensions are reduced to the atomic scale. Spatial confinement of the carriers results in quantization of the electronic motion, and thus the non-equilibrium behavior of such systems under external excitation may differ considerably from the bulk semiconductor situation. In the present work, we report on the results of a Monte Carlo simulation of hot carriers confined to a GaAs-AlGaAs quantum well. Here we have included the effects of degeneracy, electron-electron interaction, and non-equilibrium polar optical phonons (POP) in order to study the low-temperature transient and steady state response of spatially quantized electrons driven by high electric fields and laser excitation.