Plasmon-enhanced phonon and ionized impurity scattering in doped silicon

Abstract

Historically, two microscopic electron scattering calculation methods have been used to fit macroscopic electron mobility data in n-type silicon. The first method was performed using a static system that included long-range electron-plasmon scattering; however, the well-known Born approximation fails in this case when dealing with electron-impurity scattering. In the second method, sophisticated numerical simulations were developed around plasmon-excited potential fluctuations and successfully reproduced the mobility data at room temperature. In this paper, we propose a third method as an alternative to the first method. First, using a fluctuating system, which was characterized on the basis of our recently experimentally extracted plasmon-excited potential fluctuations, the microscopic calculations reveal enhanced short-range scattering of electrons by phonons and ionized impurities due to increased electron temperature and increased screening length, respectively. The increased hot electron population makes the Born approximation hold, which eases the overall calculation task substantially. Then, we return to the static system while incorporating plasmon-enhanced impurity scattering. The resulting macroscopic electron mobility shows fairly good agreement with data over wide ranges of temperatures (200-400 K) and doping concentrations (10(15) -10(20) cm(-3)). Application of the proposed method to strained silicon is also demonstrated. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.