Improved Airy function formalism for study of resonant tunneling in multibarrier semiconductor heterostructures

Abstract

We show that our exact one-dimensional Airy function formalism for studying electron resonant tunneling in multibarrier semiconductor heterostructures is an improvement on a previous calculation of Brennan and Summers [J. Appl. Phys. 61, 614 (1987)]. We also clearly demonstrate that our method gives better agreement with the numerical approach of Vassell, Lee, and Lockwood [J. Appl. Phys. 54, 5206 (1983)] in calculating the transmission coefficient T(E) and current density J(E) for multibarrier semiconductor heterostructures.