Hole and interband resonant tunneling in GaAs/GaAlAs and InAs/GaSb/AlSb tunnel structures

Abstract

The tunneling of holes in a double-barrier GaAs/GaAlAs heterostructure, and interband tunneling in an InAs/AlSb/GaSb double-barrier heterostructure were calculated. A ten-band tight-binding model was used in order to incorporate mixing between the bands. The model was solved using a new method which allows many-layer structures to be handled without numerical instabilities. We have found that mixing between bands has a significant effect on the current-voltage characteristics, especially with the inclusion of the dependence of the transmission on the parallel component of the incident wavevecor ( k ∥). The current peaks can change by more than an order of magnitude, the heavy and light hole peaks can switch in magnitude, and peaks which are forbidden without mixing can appear.