Abstract

We have reported¹ observation of a nonthermal energy distribution of electrons at low densities on picosecond timescales, using a streak camera to record the band-to-acceptor luminescence of Ge-doped GaAs. At densities less than 10¹⁴ /cm³, the electrons deviate substantially from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for up to 50 ps following a 5 ps laser pulse. We discuss these results in terms of the expected rates of electron-electron and electron- hole scattering, and we present a Boltzmann-equation model for carrier-carrier scattering which gives good agreement with our data (see Fig. 1). We compare our experiments to other recent work.^2,3,4

© 1992 The Author(s)