Acceleration of Assisted Hole Tunnelling Due to Band-Mixing Effects in Semiconductor Heterostructures

We show theoretically that the rates of defect-assisted hole tunnelling in biased double-quantum-well structures are considerably increased by the valence band mixing effects over the values deduced from simpler analysis. In particular, we show that the tunnelling rates which correspond to elastic scatterings from a heavy-hole state to states belonging to a light-hole branch are comparable to those corresponding to heavy hole → heavy hole transitions.