Effects of carrier mass differences on the I–V characteristics of resonant interband tunneling structures in the presence of parallel magnetic field

Abstract

We investigate the effect of differences between the quantum well and the electrode carrier effective masses on the current–voltage characteristics of double-barrier interband tunneling structures under an applied magnetic field parallel to the current. The system is described by a two-band tight-binding Hamiltonian that incorporates electron and light-hole interaction and the current is calculated using the Keldysh nonequilibrium Green’s-function diagrammatic technique. The formalism is applied to InAs/AlSb/GaSb double-barrier structures considering either the InAs or the GaSb as the quantum well. The behavior of the I–V characteristics as a function of the magnetic-field strength is strongly influenced by the mass differences and opposite curvatures of the conduction and the valence bands. The features we obtain are quite different for InAs and GaSb. They are both also different from the more traditional magneto-tunneling results for GaAs/AlGaAs, where the electrodes and the quantum well electronic masses are equal. The behavior of the I–V characteristics with the applied magnetic field is in good qualitative agreement with available experimental data.