Abstract
Recently, the great improvement in material quality and processing techniques led to a revival of the field of hot electron devices. Devices having current gains greater than 10 have been made successfully. Moreover, the devices proved to be extremely useful as electron spectrometers, establishing unambiguously, for the first time, the existence of ballistic electrons in heavily doped GaAs. I review briefly the history of the hot electron devices, then describe their usefulness in studying device physics: for example, in the determination of the ballistic mean free path, in identifying the major scattering mechanisms influencing the transport, in observing the transfer of hot electrons into upper satellite valleys, and by exhibiting quantization effects that take place in small structures.
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Heiblum, M. (1986). Ballistic Transport and Electron Spectroscopy in Tunnelling Hot Electron Transfer Amplifiers (THETA). In: Källbäck, B., Beneking, H. (eds) High-Speed Electronics. Springer Series in Electronics and Photonics, vol 22. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82979-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-82979-6_2
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