Papers Published
Abstract:
We study a model describing electronic transport in a weakly coupled semiconductor superlattice with a
shunting side layer. Key parameters include the lateral size of the superlattice, the connectivity between the
quantum wells of the superlattice and the shunt layer, and the conduction properties of the shunt layer. For a
superlattice with small lateral extent and high quality shunt, static electric field domains are suppressed and a
spatially uniform field configuration is predicted to be stable, results that may be useful for proposed devices
such as a superlattice-based terahertz oscillators. As the lateral size of the superlattice increases, the uniform
field configuration loses its stability to either static or dynamic field domains regardless of shunt properties. A
lower quality shunt generally leads to regular and chaotic current oscillations and complex spatiotemporal
dynamics in the field profile. Bifurcations separating static and dynamic behaviors are characterized and found
to be dependent on the shunt properties.