High Magnetic Field Study of Ballistic Transport in a Resonant-Tunneling Hot-Electron Transistor (RHET)

Abstract

Base and collector currents have been studied in an InAlAs/InGaAs resonant-tunneling hot electron transistor at 4.2 K in pulsed magnetic fields up to 42.5 T. Base and collector currents have been found to depend strongly on the field and its orientation. For fields perpendicular to the current direction, the base/emitter current ratio increases initially with an approximate parabolic dependence and then saturates at high fields. From this magnetic field dependence, scattering processes in the InGaAs base region are discussed. Using a classical model for electron transport under a magnetic field perpendicular to the current, values for the mean free path and scattering time in the base are obtained that agree well with theoretical values for electron-electron scattering. It is shown that the magnetic field dependence of the collector current at high perpendicular fields can be explained by single barrier tunneling. A model in WKB approximation allows to determine the electron energy. Moreover, by extrapola...