Finite Temperature Resonant Magnetotunneling in AlGaAs-GaAs-AlGaAs Heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron-LO phonon interactions affect resonant magnetotunneling in AlGaAs-GaAs-AlGaAs heterostructures at finite temperatures, revealing inelastic tunneling features and their dependence on magnetic field and temperature.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent Matsubara technique to analyze phonon absorption effects in resonant tunneling under magnetic fields, highlighting differences between phonon emission and absorption processes.

Findings

Phonon absorption creates broad inelastic wings on the tunneling peak.

Inelastic wing width scales with the square root of magnetic field.

Inelastic features grow with increasing temperature.

Abstract

We have analyzed the effect of electron-LO phonon interaction in a double-barrier resonant tunneling structure under a magnetic field {\bf B} applied parallel to the tunneling current. While the low temperature anti-crossing phenomenon has already been investigated, here we study the phonon absorption resonant magnetotunneling at finite temperatures. The Matsubara technique is used to sum up resonant diagrams of higher orders, and the result is selfconsistently renormalized. The phonon absorption tunneling spectrum has been calculated numerically. The result shows that the phonon-absorption process produces two broad inelastic wings on the main elastic tunneling peak, the strength of which is sensitive to the resonant condition, and grows with increasing temperature. The width of the inelastic wings are proportional to $B^{1/2}$. This is in contrast to the appearance of anti-crossing in the phonon emission tunneling process. The difference is due to the fact that the phonon emission is a coherent process, while the absorption is a typical incoherent process since absorbed real phonons have random phases.