Feasibility of Superconductivity in Semiconductor Superlattices

The possibility of designing a semiconducting superlattice of alternating electron and hole layers that exhibits high temperature superconductivity is studied by numerical simulation of modulation-doped GaAs/Al$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As superlattices. The feasibility of superconductivity is based on observations of high-temperature superconductors by Harshman and Mills$^{1}$, who concluded that the mechanism for Cooper pairing is a Coulomb interaction that is optimum when the mean distance between charge carriers within the layers equals the distance between the layers. Superlattice design considers optimum layer spacings, doping concentrations, and alloy concentration, x. The program employed in the superlattice simulations is a one-dimensional Schr\"{o}dinger-Poisson solver developed by Snider$^{2}$. \newline \newline 1. D. R. Harshman and A. P. Mills, \textit{Concerning the nature of high-Tc superconductivity}, Phys. Rev. B 45, 707 (1992). \newline 2. G. Snider, \textit{1D Poisson/Schr\"{o}dinger User's Manual: A Band Diagram Calculator}, (http://www.nd.edu/$\sim $gsnider, Univ. Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana).