How Do Carrier-carrier Intcractions in GaAs Ikpend on thc Carrier Distribution?

Abstract

Carrier-carrier interactions play an important role in determining the performance of fast electronic and optoelectronic devices. They are also very difficult to model, especially when the carrier distributions are far from equilibrium. The difficulties arise primarily from an inability to treat collective effects such as screening and the formation of plasmons, which play a key role in carrier-carrier scattering processes in semiconductors.1-4 These effects should be influenced by the energy distribution of the carriers.1 As a simple illustration of how the carrier distribution affects the scattering, a hot plasma has been predicted to provide weaker screening than a cold plasma.5 In recent publications,6,7 it was suggested that coherence effects on carrier-carrier interactions should be included when the carriers are generated by subpicosecond laser pulses. Experimentally, there has not yet been a direct quantitative comparison of carrier-carrier scattering rates from electron-hole (e-h) plasmas which have the same density but very different energy distributions, although both thermal8 and non-thermal9,10 carrier distributions have been separately studied. © 1995 Optical Society of America