Break-junction tunneling spectroscopy for doped semiconductors in the hopping regime

Abstract

We present a theory for tunneling spectroscopy in a break-junction semiconductor device for materials in which the electronic conduction mechanism is hopping transport. Starting from the conventional expression for the hopping current we develop an expression for the break-junction tunnel current for the case in which the tunnel resistance is much larger than the effective single-hop resistances. We argue that percolationlike methods are inadequate for this case and discuss in detail the interplay of the relevant scales that control the possibility to extract spectroscopic information from the characteristic of the device.