Towards Ponderomotive Trapping and Guiding Charge Carriers in Semiconductors

Understanding charge transport dynamics in semiconductors is a research area of profound technological and fundamental interest. The miniaturization of semiconductor electronics demands precise control of carrier transport, which in turn requires precise experimental techniques to characterize the microscopic interactions that influence transport. Here, we present a novel, non-invasive method for spatially confining and measuring transport characteristics of charge carriers in covalent semiconductors using ponderomotive potentials similar to those used in traditional ion trapping experiments. While trapping charged particles in vacuum has been thoroughly studied for decades, trapping and guiding mobile charges inside a solid presents unique challenges. The anisotropy of effective masses, phonon scattering and the presence of crystal impurities may act to destabilize the trap. However, we show that these processes can not only be mitigated in order to realize stable trapping or guiding of charge carriers, but the confined carriers can serve as a unique probe to measure these phenomena.