Evidences of the virtual Anderson transition in a narrow impurity band of p‐GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells: ε₄ conductivity and electric breakdown at low temperatures

Abstract

In highly doped uncompensated p‐type layers within the central part of GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells at low temperatures we observed an activated behavior of the conductivity with low activation energies (1‐3) meV which cannot be ascribed to standard mechanisms. We attribute this behavior to the delocalization of hole states near the maximum of the narrow impurity band (characteristic for 2D) in the sense of the Anderson transition. Low temperature conduction ε4 is supported by an activation of minority carriers (resulting from a weak compensation by back‐ground defects) from the Fermi level to the band of delocalized states mentioned above. The corresponding behavior can be specified as virtual Anderson transition. Low temperature transport (<4 K) exhibits also strong nonlinearity of a breakdown type characterized in particular by S‐shaped I‐V curve. The nonlinearity is observed in unexpectedly low fields (<10 V/cm). Such a behavior can be explained by a simple model implying an impact ionization of the localized states of the minority carriers mentioned above to the band of Anderson‐delocalized states. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)