We show that resonant electron transport in semiconductor superlattices with an applied electric and tilted magnetic field can, surprisingly, become more pronounced as the lattice and conduction electron temperature increases from 4.2 K to room tempe
rature and beyond. It has previously been demonstrated that at certain critical field parameters, the semiclassical trajectories of electrons in the lowest miniband of the superlattice change abruptly from fully localised to completely unbounded. The unbounded electron orbits propagate through intricate web patterns, known as stochastic webs, in phase space, which act as conduction channels for the electrons and produce a series of resonant peaks in the electron drift velocity versus electric field curves. Here, we show that increasing the lattice temperature strengthens these resonant peaks due to a subtle interplay between thermal population of the conduction channels and transport along them. This enhances both the electron drift velocity and the influence of the stochastic webs on the current-voltage characteristics, which we calculate by making self-consistent solutions of the coupled electron transport and Poisson equations throughout the superlattice. These solutions reveal that increasing the temperature also transforms the collective electron dynamics by changing both the threshold voltage required for the onset of self-sustained current oscillations, produced by propagating charge domains, and the oscillation frequency.
We study the effects of dissipation on electron transport in a semiconductor superlattice with an applied bias voltage and a magnetic field that is tilted relative to the superlattice axis.In previous work, we showed that although the applied fields
are stationary,they act like a THz plane wave, which strongly couples the Bloch and cyclotron motion of electrons within the lowest miniband. As a consequence,the electrons exhibit a unique type of Hamiltonian chaos, which creates an intricate mesh of conduction channels (a stochastic web) in phase space, leading to a large resonant increase in the current flow at critical values of the applied voltage. This phase-space patterning provides a sensitive mechanism for controlling electrical resistance. In this paper, we investigate the effects of dissipation on the electron dynamics by modifying the semiclassical equations of motion to include a linear damping term. We demonstrate that even in the presence of dissipation,deterministic chaos plays an important role in the electron transport process. We identify mechanisms for the onset of chaos and explore the associated sequence of bifurcations in the electron trajectories. When the Bloch and cyclotron frequencies are commensurate, complex multistability phenomena occur in the system. In particular, for fixed values of the control parameters several distinct stable regimes can coexist, each corresponding to different initial conditions. We show that this multistability has clear, experimentally-observable, signatures in the electron transport characteristics.
