Theory of Electron Transport in Two-Barrier Five-Layer Semiconductor Structures
Abstract
The dependence of the transparency coefficient of a five-layer two-barrier structure on the electron energy and the ratio of the widths of two neighboring potential barriers is calculated. It is shown that the extremum of the transparency coefficient significantly depends on the geometric dimensions of the structure layers. In a symmetric five-layer two-barrier semiconductor structure, the condition for the occurrence of "resonant" electron transitions is defined. It is demonstrated that the mechanism of such (resonant) transitions is explained by the interference of de Broglie waves of electrons in the potential well, where the phases of de Broglie waves are determined by the geometric dimensions of the structure, and their amplitudes - by the ratio of the carrier energy to the height of the potential barrier. It has been established that with an increase in the effective mass of charge carriers, the number of intersections of the quantities fR (ξ) and ((1-2ξ))/(√(ξ-ξ2) increases. These intersections determine the dimensionally-quantized levels where electrons are localized.