Lattice heating of free-standing ultra-fine GaAs wires by hot electrons

The authors extend their previous studies of the heating by DC electric fields of submicron-diameter free-standing wires of doped GaAs at low lattice temperatures. For lower fields, equivalent to sub-nanowatt dissipated power in their samples, all thermal processes could be accounted for in terms of electron heating alone. They consider here the regime where the hot electrons deposit some of their excess energy into the host lattice, they extract a characteristic electron-phonon scattering length that is an appreciable fraction of the sample length, and the authors provide evidence for ballistic phonon transport.