Theoretical study of interacting hole gas in p-doped bulk III-V semiconductors

Abstract

We study the homogeneous interacting hole gas in p-doped bulk III-V semiconductors. The structure of the valence band is modeled by Luttinger’s Hamiltonian in the spherical approximation, giving rise to heavy and light hole dispersion branches, and the Coulomb repulsion is taken into account via a self-consistent Hartree-Fock treatment. As a nontrivial feature of the model, the self-consistent solutions of the Hartree-Fock equations can be found in an almost purely analytical fashion, which is not the case for other types of effective spin-orbit coupling terms. In particular, the Coulomb interaction renormalizes the Fermi wave numbers for heavy and light holes. As a consequence, the ground state energy found in the self-consistent Hartree-Fock approach and the result from lowest-order perturbation theory do not agree. We discuss the consequences of our observations for ferromagnetic semiconductors, and for the possible observation of the spin Hall effect in bulk p-doped semiconductors. Finally, we also investigate elementary properties of the dielectric function in such systems.