Microscopic analysis of shot-noise suppression in nondegenerate diffusive conductors

Abstract

We present a theoretical investigation of shot-noise suppression due to long-range Coulomb interaction in nondegenerate diffusive conductors. Calculations make use of an ensemble Monte Carlo simulator selfconsistently coupled with a one-dimensional ~1D! Poisson solver. We analyze the noise in a lightly doped active region surrounded by two contacts acting as thermal reservoirs. By taking the doping of the injecting contacts and the applied voltage as variable parameters, the influence of elastic and inelastic scattering in the active region is investigated. The transition from ballistic to diffusive transport regimes under different contact injecting statistics is analyzed and discussed. Provided significant space-charge effects take place inside the active region, long-range Coulomb interaction is found to play an essential role in suppressing the shot noise at qU@k BT. In the elastic diffusive regime, momentum space dimensionality is found to modify the suppression factor g, which within numerical uncertainty takes values respectively of about 1/3, 1/2, and 0.7 in the 3D, 2D, and 1D cases. In the inelastic diffusive regime, shot noise is suppressed to the thermal value.