Single-particle Relaxation Time in Doped Semiconductors beyond the Born Approximation

TL;DR

This paper compares exact and approximate calculations of single-particle relaxation times in doped semiconductors, revealing significant discrepancies in silicon due to violations of fundamental sum rules and the need for multi-ion corrections at high doping levels.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison between variable phase approach and Born approximation for relaxation times, highlighting the limitations of the latter in doped semiconductors.

Findings

Born approximation overestimates relaxation time in Si by ~40%

Discrepancies are less severe in GaAs

Large discrepancies in Si arise from violations of Friedel sum rule

Abstract

We compare the magnitudes of the single-particle relaxation time accurately computed by the variable phase approach are with those computed in the first Born approximation for doped semiconductors such as Si and GaAs, assuming that the Coulomb impurities are randomly distributed centers. We find that for typical dopant concentrations in Si the Born approximation can overestimate the single-particle relaxation time by roughly 40\% and underestimate it by roughly 30\%. It is shown that in the case of GaAs the discrepancies are typically less severe. Our analysis shows that in general these large discrepancies in Si arise from strong violations of the Friedel sum rule. This breakdown occurs in a range of doping densities for which the random phase approximation starts to break down. Moreover, our results suggest that a multi-ion correction to the electron-impurity scattering is needed for high dopant concentrations.