Temperature Dependence of the Effective Masses in III–V Semiconductors

Abstract

Effective masses in GaAs, InSb and InP are determined in the temperature range from 77 to 300 K from the magnetophonon resonance experiments. An expression for the conduction band effective mass valid for zinc blende crystals is derived by the k.p perturbation theory and by taking into account the higher lying bands, where two momentum matrix elements P₀ and P₁ appear. The momentum matrix elements are estimated from the parameters determined from the energy band calculations. Temperature dependence of the effective mass is calculated using the expression derived in this paper and dilational change of the energy gaps which are estimated from the pseudopotential method and the experimental data of the linear thermal expansion coefficient. Reasonable agreement is obtained for GaAs but agreement is not so good in InSb and InP.