Eur. Phys. J. B 36, 313-316 (2003)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2003-00349-2

Field-domain dynamics in negative-effective-mass terahertz oscillators

¹ State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 865 Changning Road, Shanghai 200050, P.R. China
² Institute for Microstructural Sciences, National Research Council, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R6, Canada

Corresponding author: ^a jccao@mail.sim.ac.cn

Received: 18 July 2003
Published online: 23 December 2003

Abstract

We have theoretically studied electric-field-domain dynamics and current self-oscillations in dc-biased negative-effective-mass (NEM) diodes. The formation and traveling of electric-field domains in the diodes are investigated in detail with a realistic treatment of the scatterings contributions from carrier-impurity, carrier-acoustic phonon, and carrier-optic phonon within the balance-equation theory. The interesting patterns of the spatiotemporal electric-field domains are shown as a gray density plot with the applied bias as a controlling parameter. It is found that, the applied bias could largely influence the current patterns and self-oscillating frequencies, which lie in the THz range for the NEM diode with a submicrometer p-base. The NEM diode may therefore be developed as an electrically tunable THz-frequency oscillator.