Pressure and composition dependence of the electron effective mass in GaAs1–xNx

The electronic band structures of GaAs1–xNx alloys are calculated ab initio using a supercell approach in connection with the full‐potential linear muffin‐tin‐orbital method. Alloying GaAs with small amounts of GaN modifies substantially the conduction bands. The lowest conduction band exhibits a strong nonparabolicity, which is reflected in the dependence of the electron effective mass on the k‐vector. The calculations indicate that for x above 0.01 the alloys have electron effective masses, which are significantly larger than that of pure GaAs. In addition, the effective mass decreases with x. Hydrostatic pressure is found to strongly influence the electron effective masses. The pressure coefficient of the mass at the conduction band minimum varies non‐linearly with x. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

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