INVESTIGATION OF CHARACTERISTIC SCATTERING LENGTHS IN STRAINED IN0.53GA0.47AS IN0.76GA0.24AS/INP BY MEANS OF HOT BALLISTIC ELECTRONS/

Ballistic transport of hot electrons was used to characterize the rele vant transport lengths in the two-dimensional electron gas formed in a n In0.53Ga0.47As/In0.76Ga0.24As/InP heterostructure. This method allow s a distinction between impurity scattering, alloy scattering, and ele ctron-electron scattering. Using adjacent point contacts separated by only a few hundred nanometers, we determine the ballistic mean free pa th for cold electrons to be approximately L-bal = 970 nm. Fitting the electron excess energy focusing maxima, good agreement can be obtained by including the energy dependence of ionized impurity scattering. Th e mean distance between impurities L-imp is determined to be approxima tely 1.2 mu m and the alloy scattering length L-alloy is 4.5 mu m.