Vertical transport through laterally periodically modulated heterostructures

The ballistic transport in a laterally periodically modulated heterojunction connecting two reservoirs is studied: this can model the presence of an ordered layer of self-organized quantum dots. The problem is solved in the envelope function formalism using a three-dimensional (3D) generalization of the transfer matrix approach that exploits the two-dimensional (2D) lattice periodicity. Illustrative numerical results are presented showing qualitatively different behaviors of the transmission coefficients due to the multichannel nature of the propagation. In particular, deep minima of the transmission occur due to destructive interference between different conducting channels, a situation that cannot be realized in the absence of the lateral modulation.