Anomalous ambipolar transport in depleted GaAs nanowires

We have used a polarized microluminescence technique to investigate photocarrier charge and spin transport in depleted n-type GaAs nanowires (≈1017cm-3 doping level). At 6 K, a long-distance tail appears in the luminescence spatial profile, indicative of charge and spin transport, and only limited by the length of the nanowire (NW). This tail weakly depends on excitation power and temperature. Using a self-consistent calculation based on the drift-diffusion and Poisson equations as well as on photocarrier statistics (Van Roosbroeck model), it is found that this tail is due to photocarrier drift in an internal electric field nearly two orders of magnitude larger than electric fields predicted by the usual ambipolar model. This large electric field appears because of two effects. First, for transport in the spatial fluctuations of the conduction band minimum and valence band maximum, the electron mobility is activated by the internal electric field. This implies, in a counterintuitive way, that the spatial fluctuations favor long-distance transport. Second, the range of carrier transport is further increased because of the finite NW length, an effect which plays a key role in one-dimensional systems.