Intersubband carrier scattering in n- and p-Si/SiGe quantum wells with diffuse interfaces

Abstract

Scattering rate calculations in two-dimensional Si/SiGe systems have typically been restricted to rectangular Ge profiles at interfaces between layers. Real interfaces, however, may exhibit diffuse Ge profiles either by design or as a limitation of the growth process. It is shown here that alloy disorder scattering dramatically increases with Ge interdiffusion in (100) and (111) n-type quantum wells, but remains almost constant in (100) p-type heterostructures. It is also shown that smoothing of the confining potential leads to large changes in subband energies and scattering rates, and a method is presented for calculating growth process tolerances.

8 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Intersubband absorption linewidth in GaAs quantum wells due to scattering by interface roughness, phonons, alloy disorder, and impurities
• Generalized effective mass approach for cubic semiconductor n-MOSFETs on arbitrarily oriented wafers
• Intervalley splitting and intersubband transitions in n-type Si/SiGe quantum wells: pseudopotential vs. effective mass calculation
• Diffusion thermopower of a $p-$type Si/Si${}_{1-x}$Ge${}_x$ heterostructure at zero magnetic field

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Atomic-scale insights into semiconductor heterostructures: from experimental three-dimensional analysis of the interface to a generalized theory of interface roughness scattering
• An extended density matrix model applied to silicon-based terahertz quantum cascade lasers
• Material configurations for n-type silicon-based terahertz quantum cascade lasers
• Theory and design of quantum cascade lasers in (111) n-type Si/SiGe