Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 6, 2026

Electrochemical Etching and Characterization of Sharp Field Emission Points for Electron Impact Ionization
Published on: July 12, 2016
Impact ionization by hot carriers in a black phosphorus field effect transistor
Faisal Ahmed1,2, Young Duck Kim3,4, Zheng Yang2
1School of Mechanical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, 2066, Seobu-ro, Jangan-gu, Suwon, Gyeonggi-do, 16419, Korea.
Abstract:
The strong Coulombic interactions in miniaturized structures can lead to efficient carrier multiplication, which is essential for many-body physics and design of efficient photonic devices beyond thermodynamic conversion limits. However, carrier multiplication has rarely been realized in layered semiconducting materials despite strong electronic interactions. Here, we report the experimental observation of unusual carrier multiplication in a multilayer black phosphorus device. Electric field-dependent Hall measurements confirm a substantial increase of carrier density in multilayer black phosphorus channel, which is attributed to the impact ionization by energetic carriers. This mechanism relies on the generation of self-heating induced charge carriers under the large electric field due to competition between electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions in the direct and narrow band gap (0.3 eV) of the multilayer black phosphorus. These findings point the way toward utilization of carrier multiplication to enhance the performance of electronics and optoelectronics devices based on two-dimensional materials.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Field Effect Transistor
Electron Carriers
Over the many stages of cellular respiration, glucose breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. Electron carriers pick up electrons lost by glucose in these reactions, temporarily storing and releasing them into the electron...
Ionization Energy
The Phosphorus Cycle
Detection of Black Holes
Their closest cousins are neutron stars, which are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed against each other, making them extremely dense. A neutron star has the same mass as the Sun but its diameter is only a few kilometers. Therefore, the escape velocity from their surface is close to the speed of light.
Not until the 1960s, when the first neutron...
Bipolar Junction Transistor

