: n-type Ge/SiGe asymmetric-coupled quantum wells represent the building block of a variety of nanoscale quantum devices, including recently proposed designs for a silicon-based THz quantum cascade laser. In this paper, we combine structural and spectroscopic experiments on 20-module superstructures, each featuring two Ge wells coupled through a Ge-rich tunnel barrier, as a function of the geometry parameters of the design and the P dopant concentration. Through the comparison of THz spectroscopic data with numerical calculations of intersubband optical absorption resonances, we demonstrated that it is possible to tune by design the energy and the spatial overlap of quantum confined subbands in the conduction band of the heterostructures. The high structural/interface quality of the samples and the control achieved on subband hybridization are the promising starting point towards a working electrically pumped light-emitting device.
Scattering rate calculations in two-dimensional Si/SiGe systems have typically been restricted to rectangular Ge profiles at interfaces between layers. Real interfaces, however, may exhibit diffuse Ge profiles either by design or as a limitation of the growth process. It is shown here that alloy disorder scattering dramatically increases with Ge interdiffusion in (100) and (111) n-type quantum wells, but remains almost constant in (100) p-type heterostructures. It is also shown that smoothing of the confining potential leads to large changes in subband energies and scattering rates, and a meth…
Intervalley mixing between conduction-band states in low-dimensional Si/SiGe heterostructures induces splitting between nominally degenerate energy levels. The symmetric double-valley effective mass approximation and the empirical pseudopotential method are used to find the electronic states in different types of quantum wells. A reasonably good agreement between the two methods is found, with the former being much faster computationally. Aside from being an oscillatory function of well width, the splitting is found to be almost independent of in-plane wave vector, and an increasing function o…
In this paper we study the feasibility of an infrared detector based on intersubband transitions in the conduction band of the junction between two semiconductor quantum wires. We show that by varying the radius of the wires it is possible to engineer a band structure of the junction that would be favorable for creating and detecting photocurrent. The suggested concept also allows for broadband detection based on arrays of wires with different radii.
In inversion-asymmetric semiconductors, spin-orbit coupling induces a k-dependent spin splitting of valence and conduction bands, which is a well-known cause for spin decoherence in bulk and heterostructures. Manipulating nonequilibrium spin coherence in device applications thus requires understanding how valence and conduction band spin splitting affects carrier spin dynamics. This paper studies the relevance of this decoherence mechanism for collective intersubband spin-density excitations (SDEs) in quantum wells. A density-functional formalism for the linear spin-density matrix response is …
We present a study of the nonlinear intersubband (ISB) response of conduction electrons in a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well to strong THz radiation, using a density-matrix approach combined with time-dependent density-functional theory. We demonstrate coherent control of ISB optical bistability, using THz control pulses to induce picosecond switching between the bistable states. The switching speed is determined by the ISB relaxation and decoherence times, T1 and T2.
We report in this Letter our recent low temperature transport results in a Si/SiGe quantum well with moderate peak mobility. An apparent metal-insulating transition is observed. Within a small range of densities near the transition, the conductivity $σ$ displays non-monotonic temperature dependence. After an initial decrease at high temperatures, $σ$ first increases with decreasing temperature T, showing a metallic behavior. As T continues decreasing, a downturn in $σ$ is observed. This downturn shifts to a lower T at higher densities. More interestingly, the downturn temperature shows a power…
Temperature dependence of intersubband transitions in AlN/GaN multiple quantum wells grown with molecular beam epitaxy is investigated both by absorption studies at different temperatures and modeling of conduction-band electrons. For the absorption study, the sample is heated in increments up to $400^\circ$C. The self-consistent Schrödinger-Poisson modeling includes temperature effects of the band-gap and the influence of thermal expansion on the piezoelectric field. We find that the intersubband absorption energy decreases only by $\sim 6$ meV at $400^\circ$C relative to its room temperature…
In this work, the source structure of an n-type thin-film tunneling FET is engineered to get better performance. An ultra-thin SiGe along with Si is used in the source of silicon-based TFET. Two structures are compared with conventional TFET, one, SiGe is located on the top of Si in the source and another one in reverse. Simulations approve these structures can reduce sub-threshold swing, OFF-current several times, and increase the ON-OFF ratio. Band diagram for conduction and valance bands are investigated and band to band tunneling (BTBT) generation rate is used to find better performance. W…
Spin splitting of conduction electron states has been analyzed for all possible point symmetries of SiGe quantum well structures. A particular attention is paid to removal of spin degeneracy caused by the rotoinversion asymmetry of a (001) heterointerface between two diamond-lattice materials. Consequences of the spin splitting on the electron spin relaxation time is discussed.
In semiconductor heterostructures, bulk and structural inversion asymmetry and spin-orbit coupling induce a k-dependent spin splitting of valence and conduction subbands, which can be viewed as being caused by momentum-dependent crystal magnetic fields. This paper studies the influence of these effective magnetic fields on the intersubband spin dynamics in an asymmetric n-type GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well. We calculate the dispersions of intersubband spin plasmons using linear response theory. The so-called D'yakonov-Perel' decoherence mechanism is inactive for collective intersubband excitations,…
Spin splitting of conduction electron states has been analyzed for all possible point symmetries of SiGe quantum well structures. A particular attention is paid to removal of spin degeneracy caused by the rotoinversion asymmetry of a (001) heterointerface between two diamond-lattice materials. The asymmetry is shown to result in spin splitting of both Rashba and Dresselhaus types in symmetrical SiGe quantum wells. Consequences of the spin splitting on spin relaxation are discussed.
Electric dipole transitions between different cavity polariton branches or between dressed atomic states with the same excitation number are strictly forbidden in centro-symmetric systems. For doped quantum wells in semiconductor microcavities, the strong coupling between an intersubband transition in the conduction band and a cavity mode produces two branches of intersubband cavity polaritons, whose normal-mode energy splitting is tunable and can be in the terahertz region. Here, we show that, by using asymmetric quantum wells, it is possible to have allowed dipolar transitions between differ…
We present a quantum model to calculate the dipole-dipole coupling between electronic excitations in the conduction band of semiconductor quantum wells. We demonstrate that the coupling depends on a characteristic length, related to the overlap between microscopic current densities associated with each electronic excitation. As a result of the coupling, a macroscopic polarization is established in the quantum wells, corresponding to one or few bright collective modes of the electron gas. Our model is applied to derive a sum rule and to investigate the interplay between tunnel coupling and Coul…
We study linear and non-linear coefficients of the intersubband absorption in InSb-based stepped quantum wells subjected to an in-plane magnetic field. We consider also a transverse electric field to achieve near resonance conditions. Taking into account the two deepest conduction levels and their corresponding Zeeman spin splitting sublevels, we calculate dispersion relations by means of an improved version of Kane model. Besides the known anti-crossing between down and up spin split sublevels, we obtain an extra spin level crossing for some determined parameters. This crossing clearly modifi…
Electron spins in Si/SiGe quantum wells suffer from nearly degenerate conduction band valleys, which compete with the spin degree of freedom in the formation of qubits. Despite attempts to enhance the valley energy splitting deterministically, by engineering a sharp interface, valley splitting fluctuations remain a serious problem for qubit uniformity, needed to scale up to large quantum processors. Here, we elucidate and statistically predict the valley splitting by the holistic integration of 3D atomic-level properties, theory and transport. We find that the concentration fluctuations of Si …
Although most work toward the realization of group IV quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) has focused on valence-band transitions, there are many desirable properties associated with the conduction band. We show that the commonly cited shortcomings of n-type Si/SiGe heterostructures can be overcome by moving to the (111) growth direction. Specifically, a large band offset and low effective mass are achievable and subband degeneracy is preserved. We predict net gain up to lattice temperatures of 90 K in a bound-to-continuum QCL with a double-metal waveguide, and show that a Ge interdiffusion length o…
From spin resonance of two-dimensional (2D) conduction electrons in a modulation doped SiGe/Si/SiGe quantum well structure we find a 2D anisotropy of both the line broadening (dephasing time) and the g-factor. We show that these can be explained consistently in terms of the Bychkov-Rashba (BR) field which here is the dominant coupling between electron motion and spin. We obtain a BR parameter of alpha = 1.1 e-12 eV cm - three orders of magnitude smaller as compared to III-V wells. Extrapolating for low electron concentrations we obtain a g-factor of the Si conduction band of 2.00073+/-0.00010.
We show that Ge concentration oscillations within the quantum well region of a Si/SiGe heterostructure can significantly enhance the spin-orbit coupling of the low-energy conduction-band valleys. Specifically, we find that for Ge oscillation wavelengths near $λ= 1.57~\text{nm}$ with an average Ge concentration of $\bar{n}_{\text{Ge}} = 5\%$ in the quantum well region, a Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling is induced, at all physically relevant electric field strengths, which is over an order of magnitude larger than what is found in conventional Si/SiGe heterostructures without Ge concentration os…
We report the observation of the quantum-confined Stark effect in Ge/SiGe multiple quantum well heterostructures grown on Si(0.22)Ge(0.78) virtual substrates. The large compressive strain in the Ge quantum well layers caused by the lattice mismatch with the virtual substrate results in a blue shift of the direct absorption edge, as well as a reduction in the Γ-valley scattering lifetime because of strain-induced splittings of the conduction band valleys. We investigate theoretically the Γ-valley carrier lifetimes by evaluating the Γ-to-L and Γ-to-Δ scattering rates in strained Ge/SiGe semicond…
We study the electronic properties of GaAs nanowires composed of both the zincblende and wurtzite modifications using a ten-band k.p model. In the wurtzite phase, two energetically close conduction bands are of importance for the confinement and the energy levels of the electron ground state. These bands form two intersecting potential landscapes for electrons in zincblende/wurtzite nanostructures. The energy difference between the two bands depends sensitively on strain, such that even small strains can reverse the energy ordering of the two bands. This reversal may already be induced by the …
Depth-Resolved Lattice Distortions in a Silicon-Germanium Qubit Host
Q-NEXT, Argonne National Laboratory（Q-NEXT，阿贡国家实验室）；Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory（材料科学部，阿贡国家实验室）；Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago（普里茨克分子工程学院，芝加哥大学）；Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison（物理学系，威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Center for Nanoscale Materials, Argonne National Laboratory（纳米材料中心，阿贡国家实验室）
Silicon has many attractive properties for quantum computing, and the quantum dot architecture is appealing because of its controllability and scalability. However, the multiple valleys in the silicon conduction band are potentially a serious source of decoherence for spin-based quantum dot qubits. Only when these valleys are split by a large energy does one obtain well-defined and long-lived spin states appropriate for quantum computing. Here we show that the small valley splittings observed in previous experiments on Si/SiGe heterostructures result from atomic steps at the quantum well inter…
We investigate the emission directionality of electronic intraband (intersubband) transitions in stacked coupled quantum dots. Using a well-established eight-band $k \cdot p$ method, we demonstrate that the minor contributions from the valence band mixing into the conduction band govern the polarization and emission directionality of electronic $p$-to-$s$-type intraband transitions. Despite that the contribution from the central-cell part to the momentum matrix element is dominant, we find, the contribution from the matrix elements among the envelope functions cannot be neglected. With the hel…
GaAs was central to the development of quantum devices but is rarely used for nanowire-based quantum devices with InAs, InSb and SiGe instead taking the leading role. p-type GaAs nanowires offer a path to studying strongly-confined 0D and 1D hole systems with strong spin-orbit effects, motivating our development of nanowire transistors featuring Be-doped p-type GaAs nanowires, AuBe alloy contacts and patterned local gate electrodes towards making nanowire-based quantum hole devices. We report on nanowire transistors with traditional substrate back-gates and EBL-defined metal/oxide top-gates pr…
