Femtosecond Carrier Kinetics in Low-temperature-grown GaAs

Crystalline GaAs grown at low-temperature (LT-GaAs) by MBE has been shown to have novel device applications, such as in high-picosecond photoconductive switches and in MESFETs because it can be prepared as a semi-insulating material with reasonably high carrier mobility and a carrier lifetime of less than one picosecond (1). Because the carrier lifetime is comparable to the carrier cooling time (typically 1 psec at T = 290 K), LT-GaAs is an interesting material in which to study highly non-equilibrium carrier and, perhaps even, phonon distributions in a semiconductor.