Hydrodynamic analysis of DC and AC hot-carrier transport in semiconductors

The authors present a novel hydrodynamic approach to the study of DC and AC hot-carrier transport in semiconductors. To this end use is made of a total-energy scheme which incorporates simultaneously the kinetic and potential energy associated with different conduction band minima. Furthermore, convective and diffusive contributions are considered by including the variance of velocity-velocity and velocity-energy fluctuations. Together with static characteristics, a small-signal analysis under spatially homogeneous conditions of the most important response functions of the electron system (e.g. differential mobility, diffusivity, velocity-noise spectrum, etc) is developed consistently. The validation of the present approach is supported by an excellent comparison with Monte Carlo results carried out for the case of n-Si at 300 K.