Electrical excitation of surface phonon-polaritons in III-V heterostructures: a Monte Carlo study

Fulvio Mazzamuto (1) , Jérôme Saint-Martin (1) , Arnaud Bournel (1) , P. Dollfus (1) , Alexandre Archambault (2) , François Marquier (2) , Jean-Jacques Greffet (2)

1 IEF - Institut d'électronique fondamentale
2 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Naphel

The surface phonon polaritons (SPP) excitation by hot electrons of an appropriate two-dimensional gas could make possible to implement an opto-electronic device emitting around 10 THz. To quantitatively assess the SPP emission by inter-subband electron relaxation in a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well, accurate electron/SPP scattering rates have been included in a particle Multi-Subband Monte Carlo (MSMC) simulator. Our results suggest some possible optimizations to enhance the SPP emission in order to design new Tera-Hertz sources.

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Fulvio Mazzamuto, Jérôme Saint-Martin, Arnaud Bournel, P. Dollfus, Alexandre Archambault, et al.. Electrical excitation of surface phonon-polaritons in III-V heterostructures: a Monte Carlo study. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2009, 193 (1), pp.012015. ⟨10.1088/1742-6596/193/1/012015⟩. ⟨hal-00574368⟩