Hirori H, Shinokita K, Shirai M, Tani S, Kadoya Y, Tanaka K. Extraordinary carrier multiplication gated by a picosecond electric field pulse.
Nat Commun 2011;
2:594. [PMID:
22186890 PMCID:
PMC3247824 DOI:
10.1038/ncomms1598]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 54] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/31/2011] [Accepted: 11/16/2011] [Indexed: 11/11/2022] Open
Abstract
The study of carrier multiplication has become an essential part of many-body physics and materials science as this multiplication directly affects nonlinear transport phenomena, and has a key role in designing efficient solar cells and electroluminescent emitters and highly sensitive photon detectors. Here we show that a 1-MVcm−1 electric field of a terahertz pulse, unlike a DC bias, can generate a substantial number of electron–hole pairs, forming excitons that emit near-infrared luminescence. The bright luminescence associated with carrier multiplication suggests that carriers coherently driven by a strong electric field can efficiently gain enough kinetic energy to induce a series of impact ionizations that can increase the number of carriers by about three orders of magnitude on the picosecond time scale.
Studying carrier multiplication in materials is important to understand their transport properties and interaction with light. Hirori et al. show that intense terahertz pulses can generate electron-hole pairs in GaAs quantum wells that then emit infrared light, contrary to the effect with a DC field.
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