Repeatable Room Temperature Negative Differential Conductance in GaN/AlN Resonant Tunneling Diodes

Abstract

Double barrier GaN/AlN resonant tunneling heterostructures have been grown by molecular beam epitaxy on the (0001) plane of commercially available bulk GaN substrates. Resonant tunneling diodes were fabricated; room temperature current-voltage measurements reveal the presence of a negative differential conductance region under forward bias with peak current densities of ~6.4 $kA/c{m}^2$ and a peak to valley current ratio of ~1.3. Reverse bias operation presents a characteristic turn-on threshold voltage intimately linked to the polarization fields present in the heterostructure. An analytic electrostatic model is developed to capture the unique features of polar-heterostructure-based resonant tunneling diodes; both the resonant and threshold voltages are derived as a function of the design parameters and polarization fields. Subsequent measurements confirm the repeatability of the negative conductance and demonstrate that III-nitride tunneling heterostructures are capable of robust resonant transport at room temperature.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Esaki diodes in van der Waals heterojunctions with broken-gap energy band alignment
• Correct implementation of polarization constants in wurtzite materials and impact on III-nitrides
• Gallium adsorption on (0001) GaN surfaces
• Quantum transport in GaN/AlN double-barrier heterostructure nanowires
• Coaxial Nanowire Resonant Tunneling Diodes from non-polar AlN/GaN on Silicon

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Broken Symmetry Effects due to Polarization on Resonant Tunneling Transport in Double-Barrier Nitride Heterostructures
• N-polar GaN/AlN resonant tunneling diodes
• Fighting Broken Symmetry with Doping: Toward Polar Resonant Tunneling Diodes with Symmetric Characteristics
• Simulation of Optimum values of device parameters to attain Peak to Valley current Ratio (PVCR) in Resonant tunneling diodes (RTD)
• I-V Characteristics of Graphene Nanoribbon/h-BN Heterojunctions and Resonant Tunneling
• Defeating Broken Symmetry with Doping: Symmetric Resonant Tunneling in Noncentrosymetric Heterostructures
• Penetration of Arbitrary Double Potential Barriers with Probability Unity: Implications for Testing the Existence of a Minimum Length
• Strong Band-Edge Light Emission from InGaAs RTDs: Evidence for the Universal Nature of Resonant- and Zener- Co-Tunneling