Title
Fighting Broken Symmetry with Doping: Toward Polar Resonant Tunneling Diodes with Symmetric Characteristics
Date Issued
01 February 2020
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Protasenko V.
Rana F.
Jena D.
Xing H.G.
Universidad de Cornell
Publisher(s)
American Physical Society
Abstract
The recent demonstration of resonant tunneling transport in nitride semiconductors has led to an invigorated effort to harness this quantum transport regime for practical applications. In polar semiconductors, however, the interplay between fixed polarization charges and mobile free carriers leads to asymmetric transport characteristics. Here, we investigate the possibility of using degenerately doped contact layers to screen the built-in polarization fields and recover symmetric resonant injection. Thanks to a high doping density, negative differential conductance is observed under both bias polarities of GaN/AlN resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs). Moreover, our analytical model reveals a lower bound for the minimum resonant-tunneling voltage achieved via uniform doping, owing to the dopant solubility limit. Charge storage dynamics is also studied by impedance measurements, showing that at close-to-equilibrium conditions, polar RTDs behave effectively as parallel-plate capacitors. These mechanisms are completely reproduced by our analytical model, providing a theoretical framework useful in the design and analysis of polar resonant-tunneling devices.
Volume
13
Issue
3
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Física de partículas, Campos de la Física Ingeniería de sistemas y comunicaciones
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85082801481
Source
Physical Review Applied
ISSN of the container
23317019
Sponsor(s)
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Office of Naval Research under the DATE MURI Program (Contract No. N00014-11-10721, Program Manager: Dr. Paul Maki) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the MRSEC program (DMR-1719875). Partial support from NSF-DMREF (DMR-1534303) and EFRI-NewLAW (EFMA-1741694) programs is also acknowledged. This work was carried out at CNF and CCMR Shared Facilities sponsored by the NSF NNCI program (ECCS-1542081), MRSEC program (DMR-1719875), and MRI DMR-1338010.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus