NUMERICAL APPROXIMATIONS TO THE TREATMENT OF INTERFACE ROUGHNESS SCATTERING IN RESONANT-TUNNELING DIODES

Current calculations for a resonant tunnelling diode which include a s elf-consistent Born treatment of interface roughness combined with ful l charge self-consistency are presented. Approximate but more computat ionally tractable solutions which either ignore the scattering-assiste d charge or the real part of the self-energy are compared with the ful l solution. The coherent tunnelling calculation combined with quantum charge self-consistency provides an accurate estimate of the resonant current. To obtain the same accuracy while including interface roughne ss scattering for our particular device requires a treatment of both t he real and the imaginary parts of the self-energy combined with a ful ly self-consistent treatment of the scattering-assisted charge.