Acoustic phonon bottleneck in quantum dots: role of deformation variation of electron effective mass

Abstract

We demonstrate that phonon-induced variation of electron effective mass leads to a substantial increase of the electron–acoustic phonon interaction in semiconductor quantum dots. The contribution of this mechanism to electron scattering depends on a shape of the nanostructure. For dots of small sizes it exceeds the contribution of the conventional deformation potential and it prevents the reduction of the electron relaxation rate with decreasing dot size as predicted by the conventional theory.