Enhancement of Auger recombination in semiconductors by electron-hole plasma interactions

Abstract

I show that electron-hole plasma interaction has a very important effect on band-to-band Auger recombination in semiconductors. The effect is an enhancement, by a factor of about 5, of the Auger recombination rate as compared to the value calculated with the neglect of the electron-hole plasma interaction. Quantitative agreements between theories and experiments in a number of previous papers are fortuitous as a result of overestimation of overlap integrals. By careful estimation of overlap integrals the present theory gives a satisfactory explanation of experiments.