Isotropic Hall effect and freeze-in of carriers in the InGaAs self-assembled quantum wires

Using molecular beam epitaxy, we prepared an anisotropic media consisting of InGaAs quantum wires epitaxially grown on GaAs (311) A. Anisotropy is observed in the lateral conductivity and photoluminescence polarization. However, an isotropic Hall effect is observed in the same samples. We show that the Hall effect in this anisotropic heterostructure remains isotropic regardless of the change of the doping in GaAs barriers and regardless of the InGaAs coverage, whereas the conductivity anisotropy experiences a strong change under these actions. In addition, we observed an anomalous increase in carrier density, freeze-in, at low temperatures. In order to explain this, we generalized the theory of Look [D. C. Look, Phys. Rev B 42, 3578 (1990)] by considering the low field magneto-transport in anisotropic media. This theory confirms that the Hall constant remains isotropic in anisotropic semiconductor heterostructures, agreeing with our experiment and explains the anomalous behavior of carriers as a result of multi-band conductivity. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3656455]