APPLICATION OF ORTHOGONAL ORIENTED STRONG ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC FIELDS TO CREATE FREQUENCY-CONVERTING DEVICES OF AUTODYNE TYPE

Abstract

In the framework of the drift-diffusion model of carrier transport in the bulk of III–V type
semiconductors, under external action of strong constant electric and magnetic fields orthogonally
oriented relative to each other, a new principle for applying the discovered effects is proposed, which
take into account the nonlinearities of the output parameters of the working chip, which leads to the
possibility creation of new semiconductor structures controlled by a magnetic field (SSCMF). Previously,
the diffusion component of the output current density was not taken into account as a separate
effect arising under the orthogonal action of strong electric and magnetic components, which was at
first time considered in this paper. It is shown that this component is a part of the inductive transverse
output current and can be considered as an independent effect. The proposed practical application
is based on the classical relations that describe the component spatial representation of the effective
mass energy dependence and the parameters of the kinetic equations for the carriers drift and
heating in the bulk of highly mobile III–V type semiconductors structures. (The energy dependence of
the reciprocal effective mass value was obtained under the assumption that this parameter becomes
heavier in the framework of the two-valley representation. However, the mechanism of such increasing
is not considered in detail, but is taken into account as a result of expansion in a Taylor series.)
At the same time, some new phenomena were also hypothetically discovered: a diffusion detector
effect and a transverse induction effect controlled by a magnetic field, similar in its manifestation to
the Gunn effect observed in this direction. The results obtained open the prospect for creating fundamentally
new frequency-converting devices based on the above SSCMF, such as autodyne-type converters
(mixers), one of the designs of which is also proposed in this work in a waveguide version. In
the case of experimental confirmation of the discovered effects, which can be investigated using the
block diagram of the measuring setup proposed in the work, we can conclude that there are promising
new applications of magnetically controlled semiconductor structures. In addition, equipment
developers will be interested in the possibility of using the magnetic field orientation angle to control
the output parameters of such structures as part of converters