Significant Phonon Drag Effect in Wide Bandgap GaN and AlN

Abstract: A thorough understanding of electrical and thermal transport properties of group-III nitride semiconductors is essential for their electronic and thermoelectric applications. Despite extensive previous studies, these transport properties were typically calculated without considering the nonequilibrium coupling effect between electrons and phonons, which can be particularly strong in group-III nitride semiconductors due to the high electric fields and high heat currents in devices based on them. In this work, we systematically examine the phonon drag effect, namely the momentum exchange between nonequilibrium phonons and electrons, and its impact on charge mobility and Seebeck coefficient in GaN and AlN by solving the fully coupled electron and phonon Boltzmann transport equations with ab initio scattering parameters. We find that, even at room temperature, the phonon drag effect can significantly enhance mobility and Seebeck coefficient in GaN and AlN, especially at higher carrier concentrations. Furthermore, we show that the phonon drag contribution to mobility and Seebeck coefficient scale differently with the carrier concentration and we highlight a surprisingly important contribution to the mobility enhancement from the polar optical phonons. We attribute both findings to the distinct mechanisms the phonon drag affects mobility and Seebeck coefficient. Our study advances the understanding of the strong phonon drag effect on carrier transport in wide bandgap GaN and AlN and gives new insights into the nature of coupled electron-phonon transport in polar semiconductors.