Tunneling of holes through GaAs/AlAs/GaAs single-barrier structures is studied within an elastic multichannel scattering theory. The multiband nature of valence bands requires us to take into account several paths of tunneling between bands with different effective masses, and such an effect of interband tunneling has not been studied as far as we know. Calculated transmission coefficients for GaAs/AlAs/GaAs structures indicate that tunneling current is strongly enhanced due to interband tunneling. We also point out that tunneling current is affected by the phase difference between amplitudes through different paths when in-channel states are coherent. The possibility of such an interference effect is discussed.
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Morifuji et al. (1995) studied this question.