Pressure dependence study of the effective mass in Ga_0.47In_0.53As/InP heterojunctions

A study of the effective mass in GaInAs/InP heterojunctions under hydrostatic pressure up to 15 kbars is presented. Earlier results have shown the importance of hydrostatic pressure effects on the band parameters of the heterojunction to explain the experimental decrease of the carrier concentration with pressure at the interface (1). Here magnetophonon resonance experiments are performed to work out the increase of mass with pressure in our samples. The effective mass at atmospheric pressure is deduced from high temperature cyclotron resonance experiments and then used to calculate the frequency of the phonon interacting with the 2D electron gas (w_o). The value of w_o is found to be dependent on the carrier concentration of the measured samples. The lowest value is found for the highest carrier concentration sample. A band edge effective mass increase of 1 ± .1% kbar is found in the highest carrier concentration sample. This is two times smaller than the rate found experimentally in GaInAs bulk material and slightly smaller than in an AlInAs/GaInAs heterojunction. The experimental increase could be fitted with multiband k.p theory assuming no pressure dependence for the conduction band-valence band matrix element E_p. However at lower concentration a variation of the matrix element E_p with pressure has to be considered.