Tunneling of electrons in multibarrier heterostructures under crossed electric and magnetic fields

Taking Hermitian functions as envelope functions, this paper presents a calculation of the transmissi on coefficient for electrons tunneling through multibarrier heterostructures with parabolic quantum wells under crossed electric and magnetic fields by using the transfer-matrix method. Electric field effect, magnetic field effect, well width and barrier height effects on resonant-tunneling are studied in detail. It is found that all of these four factors affect the peak-value and peak position of the transmission coefficient. For symmetric double-barrier systems, the wider the well is and the lower the barrier is, the more drastically are peaks reduced by the magnetic field. But for triple-barrier systems, with increasing magnetic field strength, the variation of peak-value exhibits complicated behavior due to the coupling of the quasibound states in two quantum wells of the system.