Energy loss of hot electrons in double barrier resonant tunnelling structures

Abstract

We have investigated the energy loss processes for hot electrons in GaAs/AlGaAs vertical tunnelling structures by observing directly the acoustic phonons emitted. At low electron energies the excitation of plasmon–phonon coupled modes was observed. At energies above the L-valley minimum the onset of intervalley phonon emission could be identified through the different channels of phonon down-conversion, which resulted in additional phonon components arriving at the bolometer.