Giant mobility enhancement in highly strained, direct gap Ge

First-principles electronic structure methods are used to predict the rate of n-type carrier scattering due to phonons in highly-strained Ge. We show that strains achievable in nanoscale structures, where Ge becomes a direct band-gap semiconductor, cause the phonon-limited mobility to be enhanced by hundreds of times that of unstrained Ge, and over a thousand times that of Si.