JSAP Spring / Autumn Meeting

Technological advances in high-speed, densely packed electronic devices have brought unprecedented benefits to our society. However, this trend has also led to a tremendous increase in the generation of waste heat, which degrades device performance and lifetimes. There is thus a scientific and engineering challenge in the development of novel cooling technologies. Asymmetric AlGaAs/GaAs double barrier heterostructures have yielded promising results for thermionic cooling. Building upon these results, we developed a new device architecture based on a staggered multiple-quantum-well structure, the quantum cascade cooler. We report on evaporative electron cooling in AlGaAs/GaAs QCCs. Electron temperatures in the quantum wells are determined from photoluminescence measurements as a function of bias. The experimental data are compared to a full quantum transport simulation, calculating electron temperatures inside the device using the nonequilibrium Green’s function framework.