Effect of uniaxial compressive stress with different orientations on the hole mobility of wurtzite GaN heterojunction quantum well

Abstract

The influence of uniaxial compressive stress with different orientations to the current channel on the physical and transport properties of the wurtzite GaN heterojunction quantum well is investigated in this work. By using the six-band stress-dependent k × p Hamiltonian, accurate two-dimensional physical pictures are given for the quantized valence subband under the uniaxial compressive stress on the (0001) transport plane. The low-field hole mobility is obtained by the Kubo–Greenwood formula, taking the scattering rates for acoustic phonon, polar optical phonon, and surface roughness into account. Using these methods, the microscopic relationship between the orientation of uniaxial compressive stress and low-field hole mobility is obtained according to the variations of valence subband dispersion and hole effective mass. Results show that for temperatures around and above room temperature, the acoustic phonon scattering is predominant. We find that the mobility gain is mostly contributed from effective mass, and there is an increasing trend under uniaxial compressive stress with all orientations due to the effective mass reduction. For the same stress value, the mobility decreases monotonically as the stress orientation changes from 0° to 90° with respect to the current channel. At room temperature, the calculated low-field hole mobility is 182 cm2/V s under 8 GPa uniaxial compressive stress parallel to the current channel, with the hole density of 5.5 × 1013 cm−2 and the effective electric field of 0.93 MV/cm.