Phonon-assisted tunnelling in double quantum well structures

Abstract We calculate the tunnelling rates for interwell transitions due to electron–longitudinal-optical phonon (LO-phonon) scattering in GaAs–AlGaAs DQW heterostructures starting from the Frohlich interaction and Fermi’s golden rule. The rates are investigated as functions of the difference in energy between the E 1 level of the wider quantum well (QW1) and the E 1 * level of the narrower quantum well (QW2) . We also compare our calculations of the LO-phonon assisted tunnelling with the conventional resonant tunnelling.