On controlling the electronic states of shallow donors using a finite-size metal gate

Abstract

The effect of an external electric field on the states of a shallow donor near a semiconductor surface is numerically simulated. A disk-shaped metal gate is considered as an electric-field source. The wavefunctions and energies of bound states are determined by the finite-element method. The critical characteristics of electron relocation between the donor and gate are determined for various gate diameters and boundary conditions, taking into account dielectric mismatch. The empirical dependences of these characteristics on the geometrical parameters and semiconductor properties are obtained. A simple trial function is proposed, which can be used to calculate the critical parameters using the Ritz variational method.