Thermal equilibrium solution to new model of bipolar hybrid quantum hydrodynamics

In this paper we study the hybrid quantum hydrodynamic model for nano-sized bipolar semiconductor devices in thermal equilibrium. By introducing a hybrid version of the Bhom potential, we derive a bipolar hybrid quantum hydrodynamic model, which is able to account for quantum effects in a localized region of the device for both electrons and holes. Coupled with Poisson equation for the electric potential, the steady-state system is regionally degenerate in its ellipticity, due to the quantum effect only in part of the device. This regional degeneracy of ellipticity makes the study more challenging. The main purpose of the paper is to investigate the existence and uniqueness of the weak solutions to this new type of equations. We first establish the uniform boundedness of the smooth solutions to the modified bipolar quantum hydrodynamic model by the variational method, then we use the compactness technique to prove the existence of weak solutions to the original hybrid system by taking hybrid limit. In particular, we account for two different kinds of hybrid behaviour. We perform the first hybrid limit when both electrons and holes behave quantum in a given region of the device, and the second one when only one carrier exhibits hybrid behaviour, whereas the other one is presented classically in the whole domain. The semi-classical limit results are also obtained. Finally, the theoretical results are tested numerically on a simple toy model.