Interlayer Transport in Disordered Semiconductor Electron Bilayers

Abstract

We study the effects of disorder on the interlayer transport properties of disordered semiconductor bilayers outside of the quantum Hall regime by performing self-consistent quantum transport calculations. We find that the addition of material disorder to the system affects interlayer interactions leading to significant deviations in the interlayer transfer characteristics. In particular, we find that disorder decreases and broadens the tunneling peak, effectively reducing the interacting system to the non-interacting system, when the mean-free path for the electrons becomes shorter than the system length. Our results suggest that the experimental observation of exchange-enhanced interlayer transport in semiconductor bilayers requires materials with mean-free paths larger than the spatial extent of the system.