A novel approach to a tunneling lifetime calculation: the projected Green's function method

This paper presents a method that calculates the tunneling lifetime of a particle in a quantum well (QW) using the projected Green's function and the recursion method. The method does not have the difficulties of finding an equation's complex roots encountered in complex energy methods. The method also does not have the drawback of the transmittance methods that the accuracy of the tunneling lifetime obtained is affected by the presence of a nearby resonant level. The method can be used to study the tunneling escape of a particle from one of the wells of a multiple-quantum-well structure or tunneling in a sequential tunneling picture in which the loss of phase coherence due to inelastic scattering is important. This method is, therefore, useful in designing tunneling structures to optimize QW devices working at room temperatures. In this paper, the new method is also applied to some examples and shown to agree well with other approaches.