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Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 187602 (2006) [4 pages]

Importance of Second-Order Piezoelectric Effects in Zinc-Blende Semiconductors

Gabriel Bester,1 Xifan Wu,2 David Vanderbilt,2 and Alex Zunger1
1National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado 80401, USA
2Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA

Received 23 February 2006; published 9 May 2006

We show that the piezoelectric effect that describes the emergence of an electric field in response to a crystal deformation in III-V semiconductors such as GaAs and InAs has strong contributions from second-order effects that have been neglected so far. We calculate the second-order piezoelectric tensors using density-functional theory and obtain the piezoelectric field for [111]-oriented InxGa1-xAs quantum wells of realistic dimensions and concentration x. We find that the linear and the quadratic piezoelectric coefficients have the opposite effect on the field, and for large strains (large In concentration) the quadratic terms even dominate. Thus, the piezoelectric field turns out to be a rare example of a physical quantity for which the first-order and second-order contributions are of comparable magnitude.

©2006 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.187602
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.187602
PACS: 77.65.Bn; 71.15.-m; 77.65.Ly; 78.67.De
  • 77.65.Bn
    Piezoelectric and electrostrictive constants
  • 71.15.-m
    Methods of electronic structure calculations (condensed matter)
  • 77.65.Ly
    Strain-induced piezoelectric fields
  • 78.67.De
    Optical properties of quantum wells
  • YEAR: 2006
KEYWORDS: gallium arsenide, indium compounds, semiconductor quantum wells, III-V semiconductors, density functional theory, piezoelectric semiconductors, piezoelectricity

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