Charge Transport Transitions and Scaling in Disordered Arrays of Metallic Dots

We examine the charge transport through disordered arrays of metallic dots using numerical simulations. We find power law scaling in the current-voltage curves for arrays containing no voids, while for void-filled arrays charge bottlenecks form and a single scaling is absent, in agreement with recent experiments. In the void-free case we also show that the scaling exponent depends on the effective dimensionality of the system. For increasing applied drives we find a transition from 2D disordered filamentary flow near threshold to a 1D smectic flow which can be identified experimentally using characteristics in the transport curves and conduction noise.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figure

Two-subband conduction in a gated high density InAlN/AlN/GaN heterostructure

Magnetotransport measurements on an In0.16Al0.84N/AlN/GaN gated Hall bar sample have been performed at 0.28 K. By the application of a gate voltage we were able to vary the total two-dimensional electron gas density from 1.83×1013 to 2.32×1013 cm−2. Two frequency Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations indicate occupation of two subbands by electrons. The density of electrons in the first and second sublevels are found to increase linearly with gate voltage with a slope of 2.01×1012 cm−2/V and 0.47×1012 cm−2/V, respectively. And the quantum lifetimes for the first and second subbands ranged from 0.55 to 0.95×10−13 s and from 1.2 to 2.1×10−13 s

Weak antilocalization and zero-field electron spin splitting in AlGaN/AlN/GaN heterostructures with a polarization induced two-dimensional electron gas

Spin-orbit coupling is studied using the quantum interference corrections to conductance in AlGaN/AlN/GaN two-dimensional electron systems where the carrier density is controlled by the persistent photoconductivity effect. All the samples studied exhibit a weak antilocalization feature with a spin-orbit field of around 1.8 mT. The zero-field electron spin splitting energies extracted from the weak antilocalization measurements are found to scale linearly with the Fermi wavevector with an effective linear spin-orbit coupling parameter 5.5x10^{-13} eV m. The spin-orbit times extracted from our measurements varied from 0.74 to 8.24 ps within the carrier density range of this experiment.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure

Temperature and ac Effects on Charge Transport in Metallic Arrays of Dots

We investigate the effects of finite temperature, dc pulse, and ac drives on the charge transport in metallic arrays using numerical simulations. For finite temperatures there is a finite conduction threshold which decreases linearly with temperature. Additionally we find a quadratic scaling of the current-voltage curves which is independent of temperature for finite thresholds. These results are in excellent agreement with recent experiments on 2D metallic dot arrays. We have also investigated the effects of an ac drive as well as a suddenly applied dc drive. With an ac drive the conduction threshold decreases for fixed frequency and increasing amplitude and saturates for fixed amplitude and increasing frequency. For sudden applied dc drives below threshold we observe a long time power law conduction decay.Comment: 6 pages, 7 postscript figure

Moving Wigner Glasses and Smectics: Dynamics of Disordered Wigner Crystals

We examine the dynamics of driven classical Wigner solids interacting with quenched disorder from charged impurities. For strong disorder, the initial motion is plastic -- in the form of crossing winding channels. For increasing drive, the disordered Wigner glass can reorder to a moving Wigner smectic -- with the electrons moving in non-crossing 1D channels. These different dynamic phases can be related to the conduction noise and I(V) curves. For strong disorder, we show criticality in the voltage onset just above depinning. We also obtain the dynamic phase diagram for driven Wigner solids and prove that there is a finite threshold for transverse sliding, recently found experimentally.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figure

Shot noise suppression in multimode ballistic Fermi conductors

We have derived a general formula describing current noise in multimode ballistic channels connecting source and drain electrodes with Fermi electron gas. In particular (at $eV\gg k_{B}T$), the expression describes the nonequilibrium ''shot'' noise, which may be suppressed by both Fermi correlations and space charge screening. The general formula has been applied to an approximate model of a 2D nanoscale, ballistic MOSFET. At large negative gate voltages, when the density of electrons in the channel is small, shot noise spectral density $S_{I}(0)$ approaches the Schottky value $2eI$, where $I$ is the average current. However, at positive gate voltages, when the maximum potential energy in the channel is below the Fermi level of the electron source, the noise can be at least an order of magnitude smaller than the Schottky value, mostly due to Fermi effects.Comment: 4 page

Degradation in InAlN/GaN-based heterostructure field effect transistors: Role of hot phonons

We report on high electric field stress measurements at room temperature on InAlN/AlN/GaN heterostructure field effect transistor structures. The degradation rate as a function of the average electron density in the GaN channel (as determined by gated Hall bar measurements for the particular gate biases used), has a minimum for electron densities around 1×1013 cm−2, and tends to follow the hot phonon lifetime dependence on electron density. The observations are consistent with the buildup of hot longitudinal optical phonons and their ultrafast decay at about the same electron density in the GaN channel. In part because they have negligible group velocity, the build up of these hot phonons causes local heating, unless they decay rapidly to longitudinal acoustic phonons, and this is likely to cause defect generation which is expected to be aggravated by existing defects. These findings call for modified approaches in modeling device degradation

Weak-Localization in Chaotic Versus Non-Chaotic Cavities: A Striking Difference in the Line Shape

We report experimental evidence that chaotic and non-chaotic scattering through ballistic cavities display distinct signatures in quantum transport. In the case of non-chaotic cavities, we observe a linear decrease in the average resistance with magnetic field which contrasts markedly with a Lorentzian behavior for a chaotic cavity. This difference in line-shape of the weak-localization peak is related to the differing distribution of areas enclosed by electron trajectories. In addition, periodic oscillations are observed which are probably associated with the Aharonov-Bohm effect through a periodic orbit within the cavities.Comment: 4 pages revtex + 4 figures on request; amc.hub.94.