Spontaneous current oscillations in n-GaAs in high magnetic fields

Abstract

Spontaneous regular and chaotic current oscillations have been observed in n-GaAs at 4.2 K. The dependencies of the frequency of these regular oscillations on the temperature and high magnetic field were investigated. A non-monotonic dependency of the frequency on magnetic field was found for the first time. The Arrhenius plot of the temperature dependence of the frequency of the regular oscillations gives an activation energy of about 0.31 meV, which is much less than the values of the ionization energies of the ground and the first excited states of the corresponding shallow impurity level in n-GaAs. This value appears to be consistent with the activation energy for hopping conduction of electrons in the impurity band.