Picosecond time evolution of photoexcited hot-electron mobility in GaAs and the speed of photoresponse

Abstract

The transient mobility of hot electrons photoexcited in undoped GaAs by subpicosecond laser pulses is calculated. For this, we solve the time-dependent Boltzmann transport equation in the presence of a low-frequency, weak electric field. The attention is focused mainly on the role of intracentral Γ valley scattering in determining the delay in the mobility rise on the picosecond time scale, and the hot-electron energies are assumed to be below the thresholds for possible side-valley transfers (Γ→L,X). We consider the mobility response under two separate conditions of excited carrier density, namely, (1) low-density excitations for which the electron-longitudinal phonon (LO) Frohlich interaction initially dominates in the carrier relaxation and (2) high-density excitations for which the electron-electron interaction is faster than all other collisions. The mobility of hot electrons is very small (<1000 cm²/Vs) just after photogeneration. It rises to its maximum value with a time constant decided by the various scattering processes which are influenced by the values of the carrier density and the lattice temperature. We find that the mobility rise can be quite slow up to the scale of several picoseconds, even when the possible delay due to side-valley scattering is absent.