“Nonthermal distribution of electrons in GaAs”

Abstract

We have reported1 observation of a nonthermal energy distribution of electrons at low densities on picosecond timescales, using a streak camera to record the band-to-acceptor luminescence of Ge-doped GaAs. At densities less than 1014 /cm3, the electrons deviate substantially from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for up to 50 ps following a 5 ps laser pulse. We discuss these results in terms of the expected rates of electron-electron and electron- hole scattering, and we present a Boltzmann-equation model for carrier-carrier scattering which gives good agreement with our data (see Fig. 1). We compare our experiments to other recent work.2,3,4