Experimental Electron Mobility in ZnO: A Reassessment Through Monte Carlo Simulation

The low-field electron mobility in bulk ZnO has been the object of extensive experimental studies, mainly through measurement of the temperature-dependent Hall effect. In this work, we reassess the experimental results through direct simulations of Hall measurements, performed with a Monte Carlo transport model and taking into account all the major scattering mechanisms. The deformation potentials required to compute acoustic and optical phonon scattering are derived from first-principles computations, and an original theory for charged-dislocation-line scattering is proposed and implemented. Monte Carlo results for the electron mobility and the Hall factor are compared with analytical expressions derived with the relaxation-time approximation, which is found to be adequate at low temperatures where inelastic scattering effects due to optical phonons are negligible.