STRANGE ATTRACTOR IN RESONANT-TUNNELING

We consider the process of resonant electron tunneling through a doubl e-barrier potential, taking into account nonlinear dynamical effects g enerated by charge accumulation in the interbarrier space. We use the perturbation approach of Davydov and Ermakov, which was developed for investigating intrinsic bistability in resonant tunneling. For incomin g electron flow, which is modulated slowly in time, we show that the r esulting nonlinear dynamics can become chaotic, with the chaos describ ed (because of the open nature of the system) by a strange attractor. We determine the conditions for the existence of this strange attracto r and estimate characteristic experimental parameters for its observat ion.