Theoretical investigation of hole transport in strained III-V semiconductors: Application to GaAs

Abstract

A Monte Carlo method has been developed and applied to study the anisotropic transport of holes in unstrained and strained bulk III‐V compound semiconductors. In this letter, we present the results for the prototypical GaAs, T=300 K material system. We find that the hole mobility can be significantly increased by the presence of biaxial compressive strain in the system. This arises from strain‐induced modifications in the densities of states and the overlap functions and from a separation of the heavy and light hole bands at k=0 which decreases the heavy to light hole interband scattering. For a 1.5% biaxial compressive strain, the hole mobilities are increased by up to a factor of 2 over the unstrained values. This improvement is sustained up to the highest field in our simulations which was 20 kV/cm.