Elastic scattering of holes by acoustic phonons in thin GaAs/GaAlAs quantum wells

Abstract

The rates of scattering by acoustic phonons γ i → j from subband i → j are calculated for holes in a narrow GaAs quantum well using the deformation potential, the Luttinger hamiltonian and the Debye approximation. At room temperature, we find that the energy dependences for both intra- and inter-subband scattering rates follow roughly the behavior of the density of states in the subband to which the hole scatters. Moreover, we study the influence of the overlap between the initial and final states, and for elastic processes we find that, unlike for the case of wide quantum wells, for narrow ones integration over the phonon transverse wavevector q z should be restricted to about 4% of the bulk Brillouin zone extent. In addition the impact of the well width on γ i → j is investigated.