Abstract: Confinement of electrons in ultrathin metallic films leads to subbands. By increasing the thickness of the electron layer, the subbands will dissolve into a quasicontinuum, with the number of electrons per unit volume kept constant. Within the random-phase approximation, the two-dimensional plasmon, which originally follows Stern's dispersion relation, becomes a longitudinal surface plasmon. The plasmon excitations of a model metallic film are investigated by including all subbands. Single-particle excitations, which exhibit the depolarization shift, converge into the plasma excitation spectrum. With further increases in the film thickness, the bulk plasmon arises and the surface plasmon remains. Our analysis shows how quantum size effects evolve into hydrodynamical classical size effects with increasing thickness of the film.

Abstract: We investigate the influence of a periodic weak modulation along the x direction on the electrical and thermal properties of a two-dimensional electron gas in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field. The modulation lifts the degeneracy of the Landau levels and leads to one-dimensional magnetic bands whose bandwidth oscillates as a function of the magnetic field. At weak magnetic fields this gives rise to the Weiss oscillations in the magnetoresistance, discovered recently, which have a very weakly temperature-dependent amplitude and a period proportional to square-root n(e), when n(e) is the electron density. Diffusion-current contributions, proportional to the square of the bandwidth, dominate rho(xx), and collisional contributions, varying approximately as the square of the density of states, dominate rho(yy). The result is that rho(xx) and rho(yy) oscillate out of phase as observed. Asymptotic analytical expressions are presented for the conductivity tensor. Similar oscillations, of much smaller amplitude, occur in the thermodynamic quantities, such as the magnetization, the susceptibility, and the specific heat. We also predict oscillations in the Hall resistance, the cyclotron resonance position, the linewidth, as well as in the thermal conductivity and thermopower. The components of the thermal-resistance tensor have a magnetic-field dependence similar to that of the electrical-resistivity tensor.

Abstract: We present a theoretical study of the electronic structure of a heavily Si delta-doped layer in a GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs/GaAs quantum barrier. In this class of structures the effect of DX centers on the electronic properties can be tuned by changing the AlxGa1-xAs barrier width and/or the Al concentration, which leads to a lowering of the DX level with respect to the Fermi energy without disturbing the wave functions much. A self-consistent approach is developed in which the effective confinement potential and the Fermi energy of the system, the energies, the wave functions, and the electron densities of the discrete subbands have been obtained as a function of both the material parameters of the samples and the experimental conditions. The effect of DX centers on such structures at nonzero temperature and under an external pressure is investigated for three different models: (1) the DX(nc)(0) model with no correlation effects, (2) the d(+)/DX(0) model, and (3) the d(+)/DX(-) model with inclusion of correlation effects. In the actual calculation, influences of the background accepters, the discontinuity of the effective mass of the electrons at the interfaces of the different materials, band nonparabolicity, and the exchange-correlation energy of the electrons have been taken into account. We have found that (1) introducing a quantum barrier into delta-doped GaAs makes it possible to control the energy gaps between different electronic; subbands; (2) the electron wave functions are mon spread out when the repellent effect of the barriers is increased as compared to those in delta-doped GaAs; (3) increasing the quantum-barrier height and/or the application of hydrostatic pressure are helpful to experimentally observe the effect of the DX centers through a decrease of the total free-electron density; and (4) the correlation effects of the charged impurities are important for the systems under study.