Rights statement: © 1993 The American Physical Society
Final published version, 307 KB, PDF document
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 15/05/1993 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Physical review B |
Issue number | 20 |
Volume | 47 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Pages (from-to) | 13585-13589 |
Publication Status | Published |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
We calculate the lifetime of a nonequilibrium electron in the first excited subband in the low-density heterostructure where this photocreated carrier occurs at the last stage of its cooling. The electron interaction with acoustic phonons gives the dominant intersubband relaxation mechanism, if the intersubband energy splitting and the Fermi energy splitting are relatively small, 1 > epsilon(f)/DELTA10 > 0.7-0.8. In GaAs-AlxGa1-xAs heterostructures the intersubband relaxation determines the excited-electron lifetime to be of the order of tau(phon) approximately nanoseconds which depends slightly on the value of the two-dimensional electron density. When the ratio epsilon(F)/DELTA10 is smaller, the intersubband relaxation is determined by the Auger-like electron-electron scattering whose rate can increase up to the value tau(Aug)-1 approximately 10(10) sec-1.