M. Gault et al., THE INCLUSION OF A FINITE CAPTURE TIME IN THE NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OFQUANTUM EFFECT DEVICES, Solid-state electronics, 38(1), 1995, pp. 9-15
A simple numerical method is presented to include the phenomenon of a
finite quantum well capture time in the numerical simulation of quantu
m effect devices. If the time taken to leave the quantum well (through
tunnelling) is sufficiently short the electron states in the quantum
well will remain relatively unoccupied due to the finite scattering ti
me from the three-dimensional continuum into the two-dimensional state
s. A numerical formulation is presented which models this phenomenon b
y using an effective Fermi function for the occupancy of the two-dimen
sional states, enabling the method to be used in conjunction with gene
ral purpose device simulators. The method is applied to a simple tunne
l barrier to show the generality of the model and a method is proposed
to measure the capture time of quantum wells via observing the output
energy spectrum.