Interplay between phonon and impurity scattering in 2D hole transport

TL;DR

This study explores how phonon and impurity scattering influence the temperature-dependent electrical resistivity in 2D p-GaAs systems, revealing a nonmonotonic behavior and a low-temperature resistivity saturation regime.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the interplay between phonon and impurity scattering in 2D hole transport, estimating the deformation potential and identifying a temperature-independent resistivity regime.

Findings

Resistivity shows nonmonotonic temperature dependence.

A resistivity saturation occurs between 2 K and 10 K.

The saturation results from cancellation of phonon and impurity effects.

Abstract

We investigate temperature dependent transport properties of two-dimensional p-GaAs systems taking into account both hole-phonon and hole-impurity scattering effects. By analyzing the hole mobility data of p-GaAs in the temperature range 10 K$<T<$100 K, we estimate the value of the appropriate deformation potential for hole-phonon coupling. Due to the interplay between hole-phonon and hole-impurity scattering the calculated temperature-dependent resistivity shows interesting nonmonotonic behavior. In particular, we find that there is a temperature range (typically 2 K$<T<$10 K) in which the calculated resistivity becomes independent of temperature due to a subtle cancellation between the temperature dependent resistive scattering contributions arising from impurities and phonons. This resistivity saturation regime appears at low carrier densities when the increasing resistivity due to phonon scattering compensates for the decreasing resistivity due to the nondegeneracy effect. This temperature-independent flat resistivity regime is experimentally accessible and may have already been observed in a recent experiment.