Energy relaxation of an excited electron gas in quantum wires: many-body electron LO-phonon coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how excited electrons in quantum wires lose energy through LO-phonon emission, revealing that phonon renormalization extends the dominant energy loss regime to lower temperatures and that a plasmon-pole approximation effectively models this process.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical analysis including phonon renormalization effects and validates a plasmon-pole approximation for energy relaxation in quantum wires.

Findings

Phonon renormalization extends LO-phonon dominated relaxation to lower temperatures.

A simple plasmon-pole approximation accurately models energy relaxation.

Implications for low temperature electron heating experiments in quantum wires.

Abstract

We theoretically study energy relaxation via LO-phonon emission in an excited one-dimensional electron gas confined in a GaAs quantum wire structure. We find that the inclusion of phonon renormalization effects in the theory extends the LO-phonon dominated loss regime down to substantially lower temperatures. We show that a simple plasmon-pole approximation works well for this problem, and discuss implications of our results for low temperature electron heating experiments in quantum wires.