Ab initio study of strain effects on the quasiparticle bands and effective masses in silicon

Using ab initio computational methods, we study the structural and electronic properties of strained silicon, which has emerged as a promising technology to improve the performance of silicon-based metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors. In particular, higher electron mobilities are observed in n-doped samples with monoclinic strain along the [110] direction, and experimental evidence relates this to changes in the effective mass as well as the scattering rates. To assess the relative importance of these two factors, we combine density-functional theory in the local-density approximation with the GW approximation for the electronic self-energy and investigate the effect of uniaxial and biaxial strains along the [110] direction on the structural and electronic properties of Si. Longitudinal and transverse components of the electron effective mass as a function of the strain are derived from fits to the quasiparticle band structure and a diagonalization of the full effective-mass tensor. The changes in the effective masses and the energy splitting of the conduction-band valleys for uniaxial and biaxial strains as well as their impact on the electron mobility are analyzed. The self-energy corrections within GW lead to band gaps in excellent agreement with experimental measurements and slightly larger effective masses than in the local-density approximation.