Atomistic Transport Modeling, Design Principles, and Empirical Rules for Low-Noise <i>III-V</i> Digital-Alloy Avalanche Photodiodes

A series of $I\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}I\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}I\ensuremath{-}V$ alloy-based avalanche photodiodes are recently seen to demonstrate superior performance such as low excess noise, but the origin behavior is not completely understood. The authors use atomistic modeling material and transport properties deconstruct underlying physical mechanisms, which attributed a combination engineered minigaps, increased effective mass, spin-orbit coupling. These attributes selectively limit ionization rate one carrier type, simplified here into set inequalities that could potentially be useful for design future high-performance photodiodes.