There is Plenty of Room for THz Tunneling Electron Devices Beyond the Transit Time Limit
Abstract
The traditional transmission coefficient present in the original Landauer formulation, which is valid for quasi-static scenarios with working frequencies below the inverse of the electron transit time, is substituted by a novel time-dependent displacement current coefficient valid for frequencies above this limit. Our model captures in a simple way the displacement current component of the total current, which at frequencies larger than the inverse of the electron transit time can be more relevant than the particle component. The proposed model is applied to compute the response of a resonant tunneling diode from 10GHz up to 5THz. We show that tunneling electron devices are intrinsically nonlinear at such high frequencies, even under small-signal conditions, due to memory effects related to the displacement current. We show that these intrinsic nonlinearities (anharmonicities) represent an advantage, rather than a drawback, as they open the path for tunneling devices in many THz applications, and avoid further device downscaling.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.11808,
title = {There is Plenty of Room for THz Tunneling Electron Devices Beyond the Transit Time Limit},
author = {Matteo Villani and Simone Clochiatti and Werner Prost and Nils Weimann and Xavier Oriols},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.11808},
year = {2021}
}