Pressure effect on the electron mobility in AlAs/GaAs quantum wells

Abstract

By taking the influence of optical phonon modes into account, this paper adopts the dielectric continuum phonon model and force balance equation to investigate the electronic mobility parallel to the interfaces for AlAs/GaAs semiconductor quantum wells (QWs) under hydrostatic pressure. The scattering from confined phonon modes, interface phonon modes and half-space phonon modes are analysed and the dominant scattering mechanisms in wide and narrow QWs are presented. The temperature dependence of the electronic mobility is also studied in the temperature range of optical phonon scattering being available. It is shown that the electronic mobility reduces obviously as pressure increases from 0 to 4GPa, the confined longitudinal optical (LO) phonon modes play an important role in wide QWs, whereas the interface optical phonon modes are dominant in narrow QWs, the half-space LO phonon modes hardly influence the electronic mobility expect for very narrow QWs.