Mesoscopic Rectifiers Based on Ballistic Transport: Playing off Classical against Quantum Mechanics

Recent experiments on symmetry-broken mesoscopic semiconductor structures have exhibited an amazing rectifying effect in the transverse current-voltage characteristics with promising prospects for future applications. We present a simple microscopic model, which takes into account the energy dependence of current-carrying modes and explains the rectifying effect by an interplay of fully quantized and quasi-classical transport channels in the system. It also suggests the design of a ballistic rectifier with an optimized rectifying signal and predicts voltage oscillations which may provide an experimental test for the mechanism considered here.