Interference of impurity and phonon scattering in the magneto-transport of two-dimensional electron systems

Abstract

A calculation of the electron-LA phonon relaxation time of a two dimensional electron gas under the action of a strong magnetic field is performed using a memory function formalism. It is well known that the inverse of the transport relaxation time is the sum of the contributions arising from electron-phonon enteraction and from impurity elastic scattering. In this work we are dealing with the electron-LA phonon scattering contribution, which is the important phonon scattering mechanism at low temperatures. We take into account, through vertex corrections in the diffusive pole approximation, the effect on phonon scattering due to the presence of impurities in the material, which renormalizes the polarization function. The effect of temperature on the renormalized electron-phonon relaxation time is discussed and we show that it yields a non-zero resistivity in the phonon channel scattering at zero temperature.