A generalized propagation matrix method is used to study how scattering off local Einstein phonons affects resonant electron transmission through quantum wells. In particular, the parity and the number of the phonon mediated satellite resonances are found to depend on the available scattering channels. For a large number of phonon channels, the formation of low-energy impurity bands is observed. Furthermore, an effective theory is developed which accurately describes the phonon generated sidebands for sufficiently small electron-phonon coupling. Finally, the current-voltage characteristics caused by phonon assisted transmission satellites are discussed for a specific double barrier geometry.
A non-equilibrium Green's function method is applied to model high-field quantum transport and electron-phonon resonances in semiconductor superlattices. The field-dependent density of states for elastic (impurity) scattering is found non-perturbatively in an approach which can be applied to both high and low electric fields. I-V curves, and specifically electron-phonon resonances, are calculated by treating the inelastic (LO phonon) scattering perturbatively. Calculations show how strong impurity scattering suppresses the electron-phonon resonance peaks in I-V curves, and their detailed sensi…
The effect of electron-optical phonon interaction on the hydrogenic impurity binding energy in a cylindrical quantum wire is studied. By using Landau and Pekar variational method, the hamiltonian is separated into two parts which contain phonon variable and electron variable respectively. A perturbative-variational technique is then employed to construct the trial wavefunction for the electron part. The effect of confined electron-optical phonon interaction on the binding energies of the ground state and an excited state are calculated as a function of wire radius. Both the electron-bulk optic…
Phonon Casimir effect is the long-range interaction between impurities in condensed matter systems, mediated by vacuum fluctuations of the phonon field. For pairs of impurities, this interaction has been shown to follow a quasi-power law at zero-temperature and evolve into an exponentially decaying form as the temperature is increased. This work introduces an approach to deal with systems of more than two impurities, both at zero and finite temperatures.
We investigate temperature dependent transport properties of two-dimensional p-GaAs systems taking into account both hole-phonon and hole-impurity scattering effects. By analyzing the hole mobility data of p-GaAs in the temperature range 10 K$<T<$100 K, we estimate the value of the appropriate deformation potential for hole-phonon coupling. Due to the interplay between hole-phonon and hole-impurity scattering the calculated temperature-dependent resistivity shows interesting nonmonotonic behavior. In particular, we find that there is a temperature range (typically 2 K$<T<$10 K) in which the ca…
We consider a single impurity Anderson model (SIAM) in which the quantum dot(QD) is strongly coupled to a phonon bath in polaron regime. This coupling results in an effective e-e attraction. By computing the self energies using a current conserving approximation which is up to second order in this effective attraction, we show that if the interaction is strong enough, in non particle-hole(PH) symmetric case, the system would be bi-stable and we have hysteresis loop in the I-V characteristic. Moreover, the system shows negative differential conductance in some bias voltage intervals.
The effects of substrate on the electronic properties of Graphene remains unclear. Many theoretical and experimental efforts have been done to clarify this discrepancy. In this work, we studied the electronic transport in armchair Graphene nanoribbons (AGNR) in the presence of substrate's disorder. The three main substrate's disorders -- surface roughness, charged impurity and surface optical phonon -- are investigated. Non-Equilibrium Green's function along with the tight-binding model is employed to investigate the electronic properties of Graphene Nanoribbons. The effects of these disorders…
The spectral Matthiessen's rule is commonly used to calculate the total phonon scattering rate when multiple scattering mechanisms exist. Here we predict the spectral phonon relaxation time $τ$ of defective bulk silicon using normal mode analysis based on molecular dynamics, and show that the spectral Matthiessen's rule is not accurate due to the neglect of the coupling between anharmonic phonon-phonon scattering $τ_a^{-1}$ and phonon-impurity scattering $τ_i^{-1}$. As a result, the spectral Matthiessen's rule underestimates the total phonon scattering rate, and hence overestimates the thermal…
We develop a unified treatment of the piesoelectric coupling between two-dimensional electrons and bulk phonons in both cases of zero and strong magnetic fields, the latter corresponding to even denominator filling fractions. In contrast to the case of coupling via the deformation potential, the leading contributions due to impurity-renormalized electron-phonon vertices are not exactly cancelled by processes of inelastic electron-impurity scattering. Electron energy relaxation time, diffusion correction to the conductivity, and phonon emission rate by hot electrons are computed for realistic $…
We investigate the strain-induced coupling between a nitrogen-vacancy impurity and a resonant vibrational mode of a diamond nanoresonator. We show that under near-resonant laser excitation of the electronic states of the impurity, this coupling can modify the state of the resonator and either cool the resonator close to the vibrational ground state or drive it into a large amplitude coherent state. We derive a semi-classical model to describe both effects and evaluate the stationary state of the resonator mode under various driving conditions. In particular, we find that by exploiting resonant…
We explore phonon-mediated quantum transport through electronic noise characterization of a commercial CMOS transistor. The device behaves as a single electron transistor thanks to a single impurity atom in the channel. A low noise cryogenic CMOS transimpedance amplifier is exploited to perform low-frequency noise characterization down to the single electron, single donor and single phonon regime simultaneously, not otherwise visible through standard stability diagrams. Single electron tunneling as well as phonon-mediated features emerges in rms-noise measurements. Phonons are emitted at high …
Arrays of coupled phonon cavities each including an impurity qubit in silicon are considered. We study experimentally feasible architectures that can exhibit quantum many-body phase transitions of phonons, e.g. Mott insulator and superfluid states, due to a strong phonon-phonon interaction (which is mediated by the impurity qubit-cavity phonon coupling). We investigate closed equilibrium systems as well as driven dissipative non-equilibrium systems at zero and non-zero temperatures. Our results indicate that quantum many-body phonon systems are achievable both in on-chip nanomechanical systems…
We consider the nonlinear terahertz response of n-doped monolayer graphene at room temperature using a microscopic theory of carrier dynamics. Our tight-binding model treats the carrier-field interaction in the length gauge, includes phonon as well as short-range neutral-impurity scattering, and fully accounts for the intrinsic nonlinear response of graphene near the Dirac point. Treating each interaction microscopically allows us to separate contributions from current clipping, phonon creation, and elastic impurity scattering. Although neutral impurity scattering and phonon scattering are bot…
Here we report a scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS) study in the superconducting state of 2H-NbS2. We directly visualize the existence of incommensurate charge density wave (CDW) that is pinned by atomic impurities. In strong tunneling conditions, the incommensurate CDW is de-pinned from impurities by the electric field from STM tip. We perform STM-based inelastic tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) to detect phonon excitations in 2H-NbS2 and measure the influence of atomic impurities on local phonon excitations. In comparison with the calculated vibrational density of states…
We study the electric and thermal transport of the Dirac carriers in monolayer graphene using the Boltzmann-equation approach. Motivated by recent thermopower measurements [F. Ghahari, H.-Y.~Xie, T. Taniguchi, K. Watanabe, M.~S.~Foster, and P.~Kim, Phys.\ Rev.\ Lett.\ {\bf 116}, 136802 (2016)], we consider the effects of quenched disorder, Coulomb interactions, and electron--optical-phonon scattering. Via an unbiased numerical solution to the Boltzmann equation we calculate the electrical conductivity, thermopower, and electronic component of the thermal conductivity, and discuss the validity …
Semiconductor superlattices have been extensively investigated for thermoelectric applications, to explore the effects of compositions, interface structures, and lattice strain environments on the reduction of thermal conductivity, and improvement of efficiency. Most studies assumed that their electronic properties remain unaffected compared to their bulk counterparts. However, recent studies demonstrated that electronic properties of silicon (Si)/germanium (Ge) superlattices show significant variations depending on compositions and growth substrates. These studies used a constant relaxation t…
Spin relaxation in the impurity band of a 2D semiconductor with spin-split spectrum in the external magnetic field is considered. Several mechanisms of spin relaxation are shown to be relevant. The first one is attributed to phonon-assisted transitions between Zeeman sublevels of the ground state of an isolated impurity, while other mechanisms can be described in terms of spin precession in a random magnetic field during the electron motion over the impurity band. In the later case there are two contributions to the spin relaxation: the one given by optimal impurity configurations with the hop…
Unique electronic band structure of graphene with its semi-metallic features near the charge neutrality point is sensitive to impurity effects. Using the Lifshitz and Anderson impurity models, we study in detail the disorder induced spectral phenomena in the electronic band structure of graphene, namely, the formation of resonances, quasi-gaps, bound states, impurity sub-bands, and their overall impact on the electronic band restructuring and the associated Mott-like metal-insulator transitions. We perform systematic analytical and numerical study for realistic impurities, both substitutional …
A theoretical and experimental study of transport in a low doped multiple quantum well structure shows that impurity bands are essential in understanding the electronic transport both with and without terahertz irradiation. A full self-contained model, which involves only the nominal parameters of the sample, agrees quantitatively with a wide range of experiments.
Motivated by the recent experiment by Marguerite et al. [1] on imaging in graphene samples, we investigate theoretically the dissipation induced by resonant impurities in the quantum Hall regime. The impurity induced forward scattering of electrons at quantum Hall edges leads to an enhanced phonon emission, which reaches its maximum when the impurity state is tuned to resonance by a scanning tip voltage. Our analysis of the effect of the tip potential on the dissipation reveals peculiar thermal rings around the impurities, in consistency with experimental observations. Remarkably, this impurit…
We investigate the effects in the spectral properties of a massive Dirac system of the dynamical renormalization induce by disorder/impurity scattering within the self-consistent Born approximation. We show how that these effects leads to a remarkable closing of the bandgap edge. Above a critical value $U_c$ of the impurity scattering the gap eventually closes, giving rise a finite density of states at zero energy. We show that the bandgap closing stems from the quasi-particle dynamical renormalization and it is not associated with the vanishing of the effective massive term. Incoherent proces…
We suggest that negative magnetoresistance in small magnetic fields at temperatures lower than 3 K reported in the paper under discussion may be related to superconducting transition in In leads (with Tc = 3.4 K).
In this letter, we theoretically study the electron mobility in few-layer MoxW1-xS2 as limited by various scattering mechanisms. The room temperature energy-dependent scattering times corresponding to polar longitudinal optical (LO) phonon, alloy and background impurity scattering mechanisms are estimated based on the Born approximation to Fermi's Golden rule. The contribution of individual scattering rates is analyzed as a function of 2D electron density as well as of alloy composition in MoxW1-xS2. While impurity scattering limits the mobility for low carrier density (<2x1012 cm-2), LO polar…
Armchair phosphorene nanoribbons (APNRs) are known to be semiconductors with an indirect bandgap. Here, we propose to introduce new states in the gap of APNRs by creating a periodic structure of vacancies (antidots). Based on the tight-binding model, we show that a periodic array of vacancies or nanopores leads to the formation of an impurity band inside the gap region. We first present an analytical expression for the dispersion relation of an impurity band induced by hybridization of bound states associated with each single vacancy defect. Then, we increase the size of vacancy defects to inc…
We present a numerical study on the intraband optical conductivity of hot carriers at quasi-equilibria in photoexcited graphene based on the semiclassical Boltzmann transport equations (BTE) with the aim of understanding the effects of intrinsic optical phonon and extrinsic coulomb scattering caused by charged impurities at the graphene--substrate interface. Instead of using full-BTE solutions, we employ iterative solutions of the BTE and the comprehensive model for the temporal evolutions of hot-carrier temperature and hot-optical-phonon occupations to reduce computational costs. Undoped grap…
The modification of the quantum states in a Dice lattice due to a Coulomb impurity are investigated. The energy band structure of a pristine Dice lattice consists of a Dirac cone and a flat band at the Dirac point. We use the tight binding formalism and find that the flat band states transform into a set of discrete bound states whose electron density is localized on a ring around the impurity mainly on two of the three sublattices. The energy is proportional to the strength of the Coulomb impurity. Beyond a critical strength of the Coulomb potential atomic collapse states appear that have som…
Within the frame of quantum dissipation theory, we develop a new hierarchical equations of motion theory, combined with the small polaron transformation. We fully investigate the electron transport of a single attractive impurity system with the strong electron-phonon coupling in charge- Kondo regime. Numerical results demonstrate the following facts: (i) The density of states curve shows that the attraction mechanism results in not only the charge-Kondo resonance (i.e. elastic pair-transition resonance), but also the inelastic pair-transition resonances and inelastic cotunneling resonances. T…
We study effects of strong impurities on the heat transfer in a coupled electron-phonon system in disordered graphene. A detailed analysis of the electron-phonon heat exchange assisted by such an impurity through the 'resonant supercollision' mechanism is presented. We further explore the local modification of heat transfer in a weakly disordered graphene due to a resonant scatterer and determine spatial profiles of the phonon and electron temperature around the scatterer under electrical driving. Our results are consistent with recent experimental findings on imaging resonant dissipation from…
The singular density of states and the two Fermi wavevectors resulting from a ring-shaped or "Mexican hat" valence band give rise to unique trends in the charged impurity scattering rates and charged impurity limited mobilities. Ring shaped valence bands are common features of many monolayer and few-layer two-dimensional materials including the III-VI materials GaS, GaSe, InS, and InSe. The wavevector dependence of the screening, calculated within the random phase approximation, is so strong that it is the dominant factor determining the overall trends of the scattering rates and mobilities wi…
The paper reports optical orientation experiments performed in the narrow GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells doped with Mn. We experimentally demonstrate a control over the spin polarization by means of the optical orientation via the impurity-to-band excitation and observe a sign inversion of the luminescence polarization depending on the pump power. The g factor of a hole localized on the Mn acceptor in the quantum well was also found to be considerably modified from its bulk value due to the quantum confinement effect. This finding shows the importance of the local environment on magnetic properties…
Electron backscattering in a Luttinger liquid with an impurity is investigated in the presence of zero point motion of the phonon lattice. The impurity can mean either a mass defect, an elastic defect or a pinning defect. The phonon spectrum is then affected by the presence of the defect, which enters in the renormalization group equations for backscattering. The RG equation becomes dependent on the energy cutoff for finite Debye frequency $ω_D$ giving rise to finite energy effects. We compute the local density of states and show how the renormalization group flow is affected by a finite $ω_D$…
This paper depicts the actual variation of gate induced drain leakage current with impurity doping concentration by complete qualitative and quantitative approach. De Casteljaus algorithm is applied to describe the band to band tunneling in a thin gate oxide nMOSFET and the results are remarkably matched. Moreover for the very first time, the dependency of the leakage current over impurity density in the MOSFET drain region is explained in the context of pure geometrical approach. Surprisingly one of the proportionality constant exactly behaves like impurity gradient which results same charact…
The phonon propagation dynamics in a phononic crystal waveguide, realized via a suspended one-dimensional membrane array with periodic air holes, is investigated as function of its geometry. The bandstructure of the phononic crystal can be engineered by modifying the characteristics of the phonon standing waves in the waveguide by varying the waveguide width and the pitch of the air holes. This enables the phonon transmission bands, the bandgaps, the velocity and the nonlinear dispersion in the phononic crystal to be controlled. Indeed the engineered bandstructure can also be tuned to sustain …
We introduce a quantum Monte Carlo technique to calculate exactly at finite temperatures the Green function of a fermionic quantum impurity coupled to a bosonic field. While the algorithm is general, we focus on the single impurity Anderson model coupled to a Holstein phonon as a schematic model for a molecular transistor. We compute the density of states at the impurity in a large range of parameters, to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method. We also obtain the conductance of the impurity model and analyze different regimes. The results show that even in the case when the effe…
Considering the interband correlation, we present a generalized multiple-scattering approach of Green's function to investigate the effects of electron-impurity scattering on the density of states in silicene. The reduction of energy gaps in the case of relatively high chemical potential and the transformation of split-off impurity bands into band tails for low chemical potential are found. The dependency of optical conductivity on the impurity concentration is also discussed for frequency within the terahertz regime.
Weak impurity scattering produces a narrow band with a finite density of states near the phase difference $ϕ=π$ in the mid-gap energy spectrum of a macroscopic superconducting weak link. The equivalent distribution of transmission coefficients of various cunducting quantum channels is found.
Disorder-induced broadening of optical vibrational eigenmodes in nanoparticles of nonpolar crystals is studied numerically. The methods previously used to treat phonons in defectless particles are adjusted for numerical evaluation of the disordered problem. Imperfections in the form of Gaussian and binary disorders as well as surface irregularities are investigated thoroughly in a wide range of impurity concentrations and disorder strengths. For dilute and weak point-like impurities the regimes of separated and overlapped phonon levels are obtained and the behavior of the linewidth predicted t…
It is demonstrated that a new nodal point is forming and a domain with anomalous dispersion is unfolding in the spectrum of charge carriers in graphene, when the concentration of weakly bound impurities exceeds a certain critical value.
A Coulomb impurity placed in an undoped Weyl semimetal spontaneously surrounds itself with a cloud of condensed Weyl fermions. We find that the ground-state of this system exhibits an experimentally accessible Landau zero-charge effect: the fermion condensate completely screens out the impurity charge. In a narrow band gap semiconducor this effect manifests itself in the near universality of observable charge of a highly-charged recombination center.
The magnetic circular dichroism of III-V diluted magnetic semiconductors, calculated within a theoretical framework suitable for highly disordered materials, is shown to be dominated by optical transitions between the bulk bands and an impurity band formed from magnetic dopant states. The theoretical framework incorporates real-space Green's functions to properly incorporate spatial correlations in the disordered conduction band and valence band electronic structure, and includes extended and localized electronic states on an equal basis. Our findings reconcile unusual trends in the experiment…
We report the observation of negative magnetoresistance in the ferromagnetic semiconductor GaMnAs at low temperatures ($T<3$ K) and low magnetic fields ($0< B <20$ mT). We attribute this effect to weak localization. Observation of weak localization provides a strong evidence of impurity band transport in these materials, since for valence band transport one expects either weak anti-localization due to strong spin-orbit interactions or total suppression of interference by intrinsic magnetization. In addition to the weak localization, we observe Altshuler-Aronov electron-electron interactions ef…
We solve the problem of a magnetic impurity coupled to a U(1) quantum spin liquid with spinon Fermi surface and compute the impurity spectral function. Using the slave rotor mean field approach combined with gauge field fluctuations, we find that a peak located at the top of the lower Hubbard band and one at the bottom of the upper Hubbard band can emerge in the impurity spectral function. The peaks at the Hubbard band edges arise from the gauge field fluctuations induced spinon chargon binding inside the spinon Kondo screening cloud of the magnetic impurity. For a magnetic impurity embedded i…
We discuss the rich vibrational dynamics of nanometer-scale semiconducting and insulating crystals as probed by localized electronic impurity states, with an emphasis on nanoparticles that are only weakly coupled to their environment. Two principal regimes of electron-phonon dynamics are distinguished, and a brief survey of vibrational-mode broadening mechanisms is presented. Recent work on the effects of mechanical interaction with the environment is discussed.
Band structures of topological insulators are characterized by non-local topological invariants. Consequently, proposals for the experimental detection using local probes are rare. A recent paper [Slager et al., Phys. Rev. B 92, 085126 (2015)] has argued, based on theoretical results for a particular class of models, that insulators with topologically trivial and non-trivial band structures in two space dimensions display a qualitatively different response to point-like impurities. Here we present a comprehensive investigation of the impurity response of a large set of models of non-interactin…
We develop a theory of optical transitions in Coulomb impurity-doped two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers and study the transitions from the spin-resolved valence band to the (Coulomb) donor and acceptor impurities under the influence of a synthetic valley-selective magnetic field produced by a mechanical strain. It is shown that the optical properties of the system are determined by the strength of the synthetic magnetic field, which uncovers an experimental tool, which can be used to manipulate the properties of two-dimensional materials in valley magneto-optoelectronic…
We suggest the tried approach of impurity band engineering to produce flat bands and additional nodes in Dirac materials. We show that surface impurities give rise to nearly flat impurity bands close to the Dirac point. The hybridization of the Dirac nodal state induces the splitting of the surface Dirac nodes and the appearance of new nodes at high-symmetry points of the Brillouin zone. The results are robust and not model dependent: the tight-binding calculations are supported by a low-energy effective model of a topological insulator surface state hybridized with an impurity band. Finally, …
We analyze the valley selection rules for optical transitions from impurity states to the conduction band in two-dimensional Dirac materials, taking a monolayer of MoS2 as an example. We employ the analytical model of a shallow impurity potential which localizes electrons described by a spinor wave function, and, first, find the system eigenstates taking into account the presence of two valleys in the Brillouin zone. Then, we find the spectrum of the absorbance and calculate the photon-drag electric current due to the impurity-band transitions, drawing the general conclusions regarding the val…
We have performed the numerical modeling of Ge(111)-(2x1) surface electronic properties in vicinity of P donor impurity atom located near the surface. We have found a notable increase of surface $LDOS$ around surface dopant near the bottom of empty surface states band $π^*$, which we called split state due to its limited spatial extent and energetic position inside the band gap. We show, that despite of well established bulk donor impurity energy level position at the very bottom of conduction band, surface donor impurity on Ge(111)-(2x1) surface might produce energy level below Fermi energy, …
Unlike anomalous quantum Hall insulators, clean single-band chiral superconductors do not exhibit intrinsic Hall effect at the one-loop approximation. Finite ac Hall conductance was found to emerge beyond one-loop, such as with vertex corrections associated with extrinsic random impurity scatterings. In this paper, we investigate the effect of impurities embedded in single-band chiral superconductors in a superlattice pattern, instead of in random distributions. The impurity-induced Bogoliubov quasiparticle bound states hybridize to form subgap bands, constituting an emergent low-energy effect…
We consider in depth the applicability of the Wiedemann-Franz (WF) law, namely that the electronic thermal conductivity ($κ$) is proportional to the product of the absolute temperature ($T$) and the electrical conductivity ($σ$) in a metal with the constant of proportionality, the so-called Lorenz number $L_0$, being a materials-independent universal constant in all systems obeying the Fermi liquid (FL) paradigm. It has been often stated that the validity (invalidity) of the WF law is the hallmark of an FL (non-Fermi-liquid (NFL)). We consider, both in two (2D) and three (3D) dimensions, a sys…
