| Abstract: | At high electric fields, hot electrons injected into the undoped regions of n-i-n structures can give rise to impact ionization of the host lattice and electron-hole pair production. The holes created by impact ionization recombine with majority carrier electrons, leading to electroluminescence (EL) from the device at fields in excess of 105V/cm. In the present work, we show that the study of such EL in GaAs/AlGaAs/GaAs single barrier tunnelling structures provides a simple and effective quantitative method to determine impact ionization coefficients in GaAs. Structures with undoped regions of length 100, 150 and 200nm are shown to give very similar results for the impact ionization coefficient. The values obtained for the impact ionization coefficient are shown to be consistent with those obtained by carrier multiplication methods. |
