Electrical Breakdown in Solids

During electron breakdown of a solid subjected to a large electric field, impact ionization causes growth of an electron-hole plasma. This growth process is opposed by Auger recombination of the electron-hole pairs. In our work, such breakdown is investigated by obtaining steady-state solutions to the Boltzmann equation. In these calculations, the carriers are heated by the electric field and cooled by phonon emission. Our results imply that breakdown may lead to high carrier-density current filaments. Conductive filaments have been observed in optically-triggered, high-power photoconductive semiconductor switch (PCSS) devices being developed at Sandia Labs. The relationship between the steady-state computed solutions to the observed filaments will be discussed in the presentation. This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.