Abstract Low-temperature impact ionization breakdown in p-type germanium crystals gives rise to spontaneous oscillations of the current flow. We demonstrate experimental evidence of a particularly high-conducting dynamical state that is limited to a finite parameter regime of the current versus magnetic field characteristic. After bifurcation from a coexisting nonoscillatory state to periodicity, one observes a type-I intermittent transition to chaos and, eventually, a jump back to the nonoscillatory branch upon increasing the magnetic field control parameter. The scaling behavior of the underlying saddle-node bifurcation, already found in time-resolved measurements, also becomes visible in a square-root dependence of the time-averaged current developing both prior to and after the critical point. Our result might be of interest for time-averaged information is accessible.
Low temperature impact ionization in indium antimonide high performance quantum well field effect transistors