High field transport in PbTe

Carrier Transport and Non-Equilibrium Phenomena in Doped PbTe and Related Materials

“…14 [92]. In the NDC region additional non-equilibrium carriers were observed as well as high field domains and current instabilities [96,97,1101. The appearance of the domains and instabilities was explained in [92, 109, 1111 under the assumption that there existed an additional heavy extremum in the conduction band (so-called W extremum) so that the Gunn effect could take place.…”

“…The effect of the interband impact ionization causing an increase of carrier concentration (i.e., interband breakdown) was detected in the early high field experiments in lead chalcogenides [96,97]. A theoretical investigation of hot electron and hole transport under impact ionization conditions when the carrier concentrations depend on the electric field was performed in [98,99].…”