Effects of electron irradiation on two-dimensional electron gas in algaas/gaas heterostructure

This paper describes how the two-dimensional electron gases in AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructures are degraded by low-energy electron irradiation. Both the electron mobility and the two-dimensional carriers are shown to decrease considerably by a 1 x 1017/cm2 irradiation with the incident electron energy of 8 keV. Comparing the experimental results both with the Monte Carlo simulation and with the theoretical mobility calculation, we speculated that the mobility degradation and the 2D carrier compensation are partly caused by the formation of complex defects in the GaAs buffer layer which are due to the excitations of core electrons of As and that the mobility is further degraded by the formation of short-range scatterers in the AlGaAs/GaAs heterointerface.