Excellent Negative Differential Resistance of InAlAs/InGaAs Resonant Tunneling Barrier Structures Grown by MBE

Light electron effective mass was found to be a very important parameter for improving the negative differential resistance (NDR) of a resonant tunneling barrier (RTB) structure. An InAlAs (41 Å)/InGaAs (61.5 Å)/InAlAs (41 Å) RTB structure, lattice-matched to Ink, has been grown for the first time by MBE and dramatically improved NDR has been achieved. Peak current density as high as 2.2×10 4 A/cm 2 with an excellent peak-to-valley current ratio of 11.7 was obtained at 77 K, which is the best data ever reported so far for any RTB structures.