Mobility and conductivity of laser-generated e-h plasmas in direct-gap nanowires

Abstract

This article examines the role of field strength, frequency, and many-body scattering during the ultrafast optoelectronic response in a direct-gap semiconductor nanowire using numerical simulation. Following resonant laser excitation, an AC or bias DC field perturbs the 1D e-h plasma as it relaxes by carrier-phonon and Coulomb scattering. For bias DC fields, the laser-excited carrier distributions evolve to a static non-equilibrium from which a stable DC mobility is calculated. Carrier-phonon collisions contain the e-h carriers near energy minima for fields of 0.5 kV/cm or less, while the Coulomb collisions redistribute some electrons across the Brillouin zone where they drift into other band structure energy minima and are there contained by phonon scattering. This behavior results in carrier mobilities with a field-strength dependence specific to a 1D solid. For AC probe fields, the analyze the resulting frequency-dependent conductivity for frequencies between the plasmon frequency and interband resonance. In all cases, we compare results to standard-conductivity models by calculating distribution-averaged collision rates and times, and show how, unlike in the bulk, these quantities for the nanowire are strongly dependent on both field magnitude and frequency.