Plasma wave instability in gated collisionless two-dimensional electron gas

We present the solution of the Boltzmann equation for relatively low density gated two-dimensional electron gas where electron--electron collisions are not significant. This solution describes the plasma waves with the same dispersion law as for a high electron sheet density. In both cases, the plasma waves become instable in a short channel field effect transistor with asymmetric boundary conditions at small channel currents (provided that the scattering by phonons and impurity is sufficiently small). Our analysis also shows that for realistic values of the device parameters, the Landau damping is small. copyright 2001 American Institute of Physics