We study theoretically the relative importance of short-range disorder in determining the low-temperature 2D mobility in GaAs-based structures with respect to Coulomb disorder which is known to be the dominant disorder in semiconductor systems. We give results for unscreened and screened short-range disorder effects on 2D mobility in quantum wells and heterostructures, comparing with the results for Coulomb disorder and finding that the asymptotic high-density mobility is always limited by short-range disorder which, in general, becomes effectively stronger with increasing `carrier density' in contrast to Coulomb disorder. We also predict an intriguing re-entrant metal-insulator transition at very high carrier densities in Si-MOSFETs driven by the short-range disorder associated with surface roughness scattering.
@article{arxiv.1401.0183,
title = {Short-range disorder effects on electronic transport in 2D semiconductor structures},
author = {S. Das Sarma and E. H. Hwang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.0183},
year = {2014}
}