Investigation of the Dyakonov–Shur instability for THz wave generation based on the Boltzmann transport equation

Abstract

We compute the growth rate of the Dyakonov–Shur plasma instability of a quasi-2D electron gas by numerical simulations based on the Boltzmann transport equation. We present a method to solve the characteristic equation by a Newton approach to find the two Vlasov modes. A deterministic solver using Fourier harmonics in the 2D k-space is applied to carrier transport in the framework of the Dyakonov–Shur model. We investigate the suppression of the plasma growth rate due to the Pauli principle and temperature.