Polarization-balanced design of AlN/GaN heterostructures: Application to double-barrier structures

Abstract

Inversion- and depletion-regions generally form at the interfaces between doped leads (cladding layers) and the active region of polar heterostructures like AlN/GaN and other nitride compounds. The band bending in the depletion region sets up a barrier which may seriously impede perpendicular electronic transport. This may ruin the performance of devices such as quantum-cascade lasers and resonant-tunneling diodes. Here we introduce the concepts of polarization balance and polarization-balanced designs: A structure is polarization balanced when the applied bias match the voltage drop arising from spontaneous and piezeolectric fields. Devices designed to operate at this bias have polarization-balanced designs. These concepts offer a systematic approach to avoid the formation of depletion regions. As a test case, we consider the design of AlN/GaN double barrier structures with Al${}_{\tilde{x}}$Ga${}_{1-\tilde{x}}$N leads. To guide our efforts, we derive a simple relation between the intrinsic voltage drop arising from polar effects, average alloy composition of the active region, and the alloy concentration of the leads. Polarization-balanced designs secure good filling of the ground state for unbiased structures, while for biased structures with efficient emptying of the active structure it removes the depletion barriers.

References in corpus (5)

• Semiconductor Superlattices: A model system for nonlinear transport
• Non-linear macroscopic polarization in III-V nitride alloys
• Polarization-Engineering in III-V Nitride Heterostructures: New Opportunities For Device Design
• Temperature stability of intersubband transitions in AlN/GaN quantum wells
• A general solution to the Schrödinger-Poission equation for charged hard wall: Application to potential profile of an AlN/GaN barrier structure

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Broken Symmetry Effects due to Polarization on Resonant Tunneling Transport in Double-Barrier Nitride Heterostructures
• Fighting Broken Symmetry with Doping: Toward Polar Resonant Tunneling Diodes with Symmetric Characteristics