Coulomb scattering lifetime of a two-dimensional electron gas

Abstract

Motivated by a recent tunneling experiment in a double quantum-well system, which reports an anomalously enhanced electronic scattering rate in a clean two-dimensional electron gas, we calculate the inelastic quasiparticle lifetime due to electron-electron interaction in a single loop dynamically screened Coulomb interaction within the random-phase approximation. We obtain excellent quantitative agreement with the inelastic scattering rates in the tunneling experiment without any adjustable parameter, finding that the reported large (\ensuremath{\ge} a factor of 6) disagreement between theory and experiment arises from quantitative errors in the existing theoretical work and from the off-shell energy dependence of the electron self-energy. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.