Eur. Phys. J. B 5, 143-152 (1998)
https://doi.org/10.1007/s100510050427

General plasma behavior in the energy relaxation of electrons in highly p-doped semiconductors^*

¹ Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia (INFM) and Dipartimento di Fisca, Università di Modena, 41100 Modena, Italy
² Institut für Theoretische Physik, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, 8010 Graz, Austria
³ Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
⁴ Département de Chimie Physique, Université de Genève, 1211 Geneva and Institut für Physik, Universität Basel, 4056 Basel, Switzerland

Corresponding author: ^a hohenester@unimo.it.

Received: 1 April 1998
Revised: 6 May 1998
Accepted: 18 May 1998
Published online: 15 September 1998

Abstract

We present a systematic study of the dependence of the energy relaxation of photo-excited minority electrons on the doping concentration in highly p-doped GaAs. A nonmonotonic dependence is found in the region where the characteristics of the carrier-carrier interaction changes from plasmon-mediated to quasistatically screened. Using a detailed Monte-Carlo study we are able to attribute this observation to a general property of plasmas at high density.