Session C17 - Lasers/Semiconductor Devices.
FOCUS session, Monday morning, March 12
Room 304, Washington State Convention Center
Collective impact ionization has been used by Hjalmarson et al. (H. Hjalmarson, F. Zutavern, G. Loubriel, A. Baca, and D. Wake, Sandia Report SAND93-3972(1996).) to explain the lock-on effect observed in GaAs photconductive semiconductor switches (PCSS's). The basic idea of collective impact ionization is that, at high density, carrier-carrier interactions increase the number of c arriers at high energies. Further, this increase causes an increase in the number of carriers available for impact ionization thus increasing the impact ionization probablity. In this presentation, we will discuss various contributions to the total carrier-carrier scattering rate, and we will discuss their use in Monte Carlo calculations of the carrier distribution function and its dependence on electric field and carrier density.