Electrical and optical conductivities of hole gas in p-doped bulk III–V semiconductors

Abstract

We study electrical and optical conductivities of hole gas in p-doped bulk III-V semiconductors described by the Luttinger Hamiltonian. We provide exact analytical expressions of the Drude conductivity, inverse relaxation time for various impurity potentials, Drude weight, and optical conductivity in terms of the Luttinger parameters γ1 and γ2. The back scattering is completely suppressed as a result of the helicity conservation of the heavy and light hole states. The energy dependence of the relaxation time for the hole states is different from the Brooks-Herring formula for electron gas in n-doped semiconductors. We find that the inverse relaxation time of heavy holes is much less than that of the light holes for Coulomb-type and Gaussian-type impurity potentials and vice-versa for a short-range impurity potential. The Drude conductivity increases non-linearly with the increase in the hole density. The exponent of the density dependence of the conductivity is obtained in the Thomas-Fermi limit. The Drude weight varies linearly with the density even in the presence of the spin-orbit coupling. The finite-frequency optical conductivity goes as ω, and its amplitude strongly depends on the Luttinger parameters. The Luttinger parameters can be extracted from the optical conductivity measurement.