Quantum kinetic approach to electron-LO-phonon relaxation: Is there a phonon bottleneck problem in optoelectronic devices?
Abstract
The time evolution of optically excited carriers in semiconductor quantum wells and quantum dots is analyzed for their interaction with LO-phonons. Both the full two-time Green's function formalism and the one-time approximation provided by the generalized Kadanoff-Baym ansatz are considered, in order to compare their description of relaxation processes. It is shown that the two-time quantum kinetics leads to thermalization in all the examined cases, which is not the case for the one-time approach in the intermediate-coupling regime, even though it provides convergence to a steady state. The thermalization criterion used is the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger condition.
- Publication:
-
Physics and Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices XV
- Pub Date:
- February 2007
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.717238
- Bibcode:
- 2007SPIE.6468E..16G