Double-drift plasma instabilities in contiguous two-dimensional electron and hole gases: A solid-state two-stream amplifier

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
A new type of solid-state broad-band amplifier is proposed, which makes use of pairs of two-dimensional electron and hole gases which are created at the interfaces of a compositional-doping superlattice. It is shown that when these carrier gases are drifted in opposite directions by an applied electric field, the system is unstable against the formation of electrostatic waves. This instability is analogous to the two-stream instability of classical plasma physics, and can be used to amplify properly input signals over a wide range of frequencies. Calculations are presented for a single pair of gases side by side; considerable gain is predicted even for this single-pair configuration.