Impurity-assisted Auger recombination in semiconductors

Abstract

I have developed a theory of impurity-assisted Auger recombination in semiconductors. It is found that the impurity-assisted process is predominant over the pure collision and the phonon-assisted Auger process in the hole concentration range of $p\ensuremath{\gtrsim}{10}^{19}$ ${\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$, especially when the temperature is below 300 K. The theory is applied to $p$-GaAs and $p$-GaSb as typical cases where the band-gap energy is much larger than the spin-orbit splitting and where these are comparable, respectively. The calculated results are in reasonable agreement with experiments reported on both materials with $p={10}^{19}$ ${\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ at 77 K.