Coulomb Interaction Among Transporting Charge Carriers Confined In Two Dimensions

The time evolution of trapped charge carriers in an oxide layer as in a charge-trap nonvolatile memory was studied experimentally with electrostatic force microscopy and Monte Carlo simulation based on Smoluchowski equation for a localized charge system. Experimental results show non-Fickian behavior as suggested by our calculation. In the charge carrier transport in an oxide, the ratio of the drift current driven by the self-induced electric field to the diffusion current was explicitly solved for Gaussian and Lorentzian charge distributions in two dimensions. The ratio is scaled by a quantity of the total charge divided by the characteristic width of the charge distribution. It was found that the drift current is comparable to the diffusion current when charge of 10(-16) C is confined within a region of micrometer size. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics. [DOI: 10.1063/1.3006690]