Improved Monte Carlo method for the study of electron transport in degenerate semiconductors

Standard Lugli-Ferry method for including Pauli principle in Monte Carlo simulations yields unphysical results when the system is strongly degenerate. For example, one finds that distribution function is higher than unity in low energy region. In this article we explain the origin of these errors. We propose simple correction in order to overcome these problems without significant increase of required computational resources. We applied our method to the study of electron transport in degenerate In0.53Ga0.47As at 77 K. We found good agreement between obtained results and theoretical Fermi-Dirac distribution in zero field limit. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(98)01519-9]