Study of lower-dimensional transport by electroluminescence.

It has been known for quite some time that many semiconducting materials and devices emit visible light when subject to high electric fields (Haynes and Briggs. 1952). This electroluminescence (EL) is becoming apparent at quite low operating voltages in modern, small-sized structures (Herzog et al., 1989) and may be used to study the transport behavior in transistors as well as 2- and I-dimensional conducting layers (Zappe and Moglestue, 1990). We have used this effect to study the scattering, real-space transfer and energy-loss mechanisms of conduction electrons in some of these systems.