Effect of residual acceptors on electron mobility in single asymmetric quantum wells

We present the results of the calculation of the low-temperature electron mobility in one-side modulation-doped single asymmetric quantum wells, taking into account the presence of residual impurities. The effects of ionized acceptors were included in the variational calculation within the depletion approximation. All relevant scattering rates were taken into account, namely acoustic phonons, ionized impurities (remote and background), alloy disorder and interface roughness. The mobility dependencies on the electron gas density and residual acceptor concentration were found and we show that the background impurity scattering rate is the main scattering mechanism for acceptor concentrations above View the MathML source, in good agreement to recent experimental works involving high-quality GaAs/AlGaAs modulation-doped quantum wells.