Scattering of carriers by coupled plasmon-phonon modes in bulk polar semiconductors and polar semiconductor heterostructures

Abstract

We present a general treatment of carrier scattering by coupled phonon-plasmon collective modes in polar semiconductors, taking anharmonic phonon decay into account and self-consistently calculating carrier momentum relaxation rates and carrier mobility in a parabolic band model. We iteratively solve the weak-field Boltzmann equations for carriers and collective modes and obtain their nonequilibrium distribution functions. Both the scattering rates and the anharmonic decay of the coupled modes are expressed through the total dielectric function of the semiconductor, consisting of a damped lattice dielectric function, and a temperature dependent random phase approximation dielectric function for the carrier plasma. We show that the decay of the coupled modes has a significant effect on the contribution to the mobility limited by carrier-coupled mode scattering. We also propose a scalar quantity, the phonon dissipation weight factor, with which this effect can be estimated from an analytic expression. We apply this treatment to dynamically screened electron-longitudinal optical phonon scattering in bulk polar semiconductors, and to dynamically screened remote phonon scattering in polar heterostructures where monolayers of ${\mathrm{MoS}}_{2}$ are sandwiched between various polar dielectrics. We find that a dynamic treatment of the remote phonon scattering yields mobilities up to 75% higher than a static screening approximation does for structures which consist of a monolayer of ${\mathrm{MoS}}_{2}$ between hafnia and silica. Moreover, we show that accounting for the nonzero thickness of the ${\mathrm{MoS}}_{2}$ interface layer has an important effect on the calculated mobility in the same structure.