News Article
Electrical resistance could be transformed
Studies on electric friction in gallium arsenide could be useful in the future for designing more efficient and faster electronics and finding new tricks to reduce electrical resistance
Researchers at the Max-Born-Institute, Berlin, Germany, have observed the extremely fast onset of electrical resistance in a compound semiconductor by following electron motions in real-time.
When you first learned about electric currents, you may have asked how the electrons in a solid material move from the negative to the positive terminal. In principle, they could ‘fly’ through the solid, without being affected by the atoms or other charges of the material.
Under normal conditions this doesn't tend to happen because the electrons interact with the vibrating atoms or with impurities. These collisions typically occur within an extremely short time, usually about 100 femtoseconds (10-13 seconds, or a tenth of a trillionth of a second).
So the electron motion along the material, rather than being like running down an empty street, is more like trying to walk through a very dense crowd. Typically, electrons move only with a speed of 1m per hour; they are slower than snails.
Although the electrons collide with something very frequently in the material, these collisions do take a finite time to occur. Just like if you are walking through a crowd, sometimes there are small empty spaces where you can walk a little faster for a short distance. If it were possible to follow the electrons on an extremely fast (femtosecond) time scale, then you would expect to see that when the battery is first turned on, for a very short time, the electrons really do fly unperturbed through the material before they bump into anything.
This is exactly what scientists at the Max-Born-Institute in Berlin recently did in gallium arsenide (GaAs). Extremely short bursts of terahertz light (1 terahertz = 1012 Hz, 1 trillion oscillations per second) were used instead of the battery (light has an electric field, just like a battery) to accelerate optically generated free electrons in a piece of GaAs.
The accelerated electrons generate another electric field, which, if measured with femtosecond time resolution, indicates exactly what they are doing. The researchers saw that the electrons travelled unperturbed in the direction of the electric field when the battery was first turned on. About 300 femtoseconds later, their velocity slowed down due to collisions.
Optically generated electrons (blue balls) and holes (red balls) show random thermal motion before the terahertz pulse hits the sample (left). The electric field (green arrow) accelerates electrons and holes in opposite directions. After the onset of scattering, this motion is slowed down and results in a heated electron-hole gas, i.e., in faster thermal motion. (Image copyright MBI)
These experiments allowed the researchers to determine which type of collision is mainly responsible for the velocity loss. Interestingly, they found that the main collision partners were not atomic vibrations but positively charged particles called holes. A hole is just a missing electron in the valence band of the semiconductor, which can itself be viewed as a positively charged particle with a mass 6 times higher than the electron.
Optical excitation of the semiconductor generates both free electrons and holes which the terahertz bursts, our battery, move in opposite directions. Because the holes have such a large mass, they do not move very fast, but they do get in the way of the electrons, making them slower.
Such a direct understanding of electric friction will be useful in the future for designing more efficient and faster electronics, and perhaps for finding new tricks to reduce electrical resistance.
Further details of this work has been published in the paper,"High-Field Transport in an Electron-Hole Plasma: Transition from Ballistic to Drift Motion", by Bowlan et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 256602 (2011).
