Chaotic carrier transport induced by impact ionization in semiconductors

Abstract

Chaotic carrier transport induced by impact ionization of neutral impurities (i.e. impurity avalanche breakdown at low temperature) in semiconductors (e.g. GaAs Ge, InSb) has been summarized. Viewed over the wide spectrum of the observations, a universality class of low-dimensional dissipative chaos is recognized in the related nonlinear carrier transport. Among various types of the current instabilities reviewed, driven chaos and crossover instability in n-GaAs have been used as examples to show typical low-dimensional chaos. High-dimensional complex behaviour of the current instability has also been discussed.