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Register a new userThermoelectric efficiency in the space-charge-limited transport regime in semiconductors
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Authors
Franc{c}ois Leonard
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The thermoelectric efficiency of semiconductors is usually considered in the ohmic electronic transport regime, which is achieved through high doping. Here we consider the opposite regime of low doping where the current-voltage characteristics are nonlinear and dominated by space-charge-limited transport. We show that in this regime, the thermoelectric efficiency can be described by a single figure of merit, in analogy with the ohmic case. Efficiencies for bulk, thin film, and nanowire materials are discussed, and it is proposed that nanowires are the most promising to take advantage of space-charge-limited transport for thermoelectrics.
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We studied electric current and noise in planar GaN nanowires (NWs). The results obtained at low voltages provide us with estimates of the depletion effects in the NWs. For larger voltages, we observed the space-charge limited current (SCLC) effect. The onset of the effect clearly correlates with the NW width. For narrow NWs the mature SCLC regime was achieved. This effect has great impact on fluctuation characteristics of studied NWs. At low voltages, we found that the normalized noise level increases with decreasing NW width. In the SCLC regime, a further increase in the normalized noise intensity (up to 1E4 times) was observed, as well as a change in the shape of the spectra with a tendency towards slope -3/2. We suggest that the features of the electric current and noise found in the NWs are of a general character and will have an impact on the development of NW-based devices.
The potential of semiconductors assembled from nanocrystals (NC semiconductors) has been demonstrated for a broad array of electronic and optoelectronic devices, including transistors, light emitting diodes, solar cells, photodetectors, thermoelectrics, and phase charge memory cells. Despite the commercial success of nanocrystals as optical absorbers and emitters, applications involving charge transport through NC semiconductors have eluded exploitation due to the inability for predictive control of their electronic properties. Here, we perform large-scale, ab-initio simulations to understand carrier transport, generation, and trapping in NC-based semiconductors from first principles. We use these findings to build the first predictive model for charge transport in NC semiconductors, which we validate experimentally. Our work reveals that we have been thinking about transport in NC semiconductors incorrectly. Our new insights provide a path for systematic engineering of NC semiconductors, which in fact offer previously unexplored opportunities for tunability not achievable in other semiconductor systems.
The current-voltage characteristics of thin wires are often observed to be nonlinear, and this behavior has been ascribed to Schottky barriers at the contacts. We present electronic transport measurements on GaN nanorods and demonstrate that the nonlinear behavior originates instead from space-charge-limited current. A theory of space-charge-limited current in thin wires corroborates the experiments, and shows that poor screening in high aspect ratio materials leads to a dramatic enhancement of space-charge limited current, resulting in new scaling in terms of the aspect ratio.
It is known that when strong electric field is applied to a semiconductor sample, the current voltage characteristic deviates from the linear response. In this letter, we propose a new point of view of nonlinearity in semiconductors which is associated with the electron temperature dependence on the recombination rate. The heating of the charge carriers breaks the balance between generation and recombination, giving rise to nonequilibrium charge carriers concentration and nonlinearity.
As is well known, the fluctuations from a stable stationary nonequilibrium state are described by a linearized nonhomogeneous Boltzmann-Langevin equation. The stationary state itself may be described by a nonlinear Boltzmann equation. The ways of its linearization sometimes seem to be not unique. We argue that there is actually a unique way to obtain a linear equation for the fluctuations. In the present paper we treat as an example an analytical theory of nonequilibrium shot noise in a diffusive conductor under the space charge limited regime. Our approach is compared with that of Schomerus, Mishchenko and Beenakker [Phys. Rev. B 60, 5839 (1999)]. We find some difference between the present theory and the approach of their paper and discuss a possible origin of the difference. We believe that it is related to the fundamentals of the theory of fluctuation phenomena in a nonequilibrium electron gas.
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