This book originated out of a desire to provide students with an instrument which might lead them from knowledge of elementary classical and quantum physics to moderntheoreticaltechniques for the analysisof electrontransport in semiconductors. The book is basically a textbook for students of physics, material science, and electronics. Rather than a monograph on detailed advanced research in a speci?c area, it intends to introduce the reader to the fascinating ?eld of electron dynamics in semiconductors, a ?eld that, through its applications to electronics, greatly contributed to the transformationof all our lives in the second half of the twentieth century, and continues to provide surprises and new challenges. The ?eld is so extensive that it has been necessary to leave aside many subjects, while others could be dealt with only in terms of their basic principles. The book is divided into ?ve major parts. Part I moves from a survey of the fundamentals of classical and quantum physics to a brief review of basic semiconductor physics. Its purpose is to establish a common platform of language and symbols, and to make the entire treatment, as far as pos- ble, self-contained. Parts II and III, respectively, develop transport theory in bulk semiconductors in semiclassical and quantum frames. Part IV is devoted to semiconductor structures, including devices and mesoscopic coherent s- tems. Finally, Part V develops the basic theoretical tools of transport theory within the modern nonequilibrium Green-function formulation, starting from an introduction to second-quantization formalism.

This textbook is aimed at second-year graduate students in Physics, Electrical Engineering, or Materials Science. It presents a rigorous introduction to electronic transport in solids, especially at the nanometer scale.Understanding electronic transport in solids requires some basic knowledge of Hamiltonian Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Condensed Matter Theory, and Statistical Mechanics. Hence, this book discusses those sub-topics which are required to deal with electronic transport in a single, self-contained course. This will be useful for students who intend to work in academia or the nano/ micro-electronics industry.Further topics covered include: the theory of energy bands in crystals, of second quantization and elementary excitations in solids, of the dielectric properties of semiconductors with an emphasis on dielectric screening and coupled interfacial modes, of electron scattering with phonons, plasmons, electrons and photons, of the derivation of transport equations in semiconductors and semiconductor nanostructures somewhat at the quantum level, but mainly at the semi-classical level. The text presents examples relevant to current research, thus not only about Si, but also about III-V compound semiconductors, nanowires, graphene and graphene nanoribbons. In particular, the text gives major emphasis to plane-wave methods applied to the electronic structure of solids, both DFT and empirical pseudopotentials, always paying attention to their effects on electronic transport and its numerical treatment. The core of the text is electronic transport, with ample discussions of the transport equations derived both in the quantum picture (the Liouville-von Neumann equation) and semi-classically (the Boltzmann transport equation, BTE). An advanced chapter, Chapter 18, is strictly related to the ‘tricky’ transition from the time-reversible Liouville-von Neumann equation to the time-irreversible Green’s functions, to the density-matrix formalism and, classically, to the Boltzmann transport equation. Finally, several methods for solving the BTE are also reviewed, including the method of moments, iterative methods, direct matrix inversion, Cellular Automata and Monte Carlo. Four appendices complete the text.

Hot-Electron Transport in Semiconductors (Topics in Applied Physics).

This book contains the first systematic and detailed exposition of the linear theory of the stationary electron transport phenomena in semiconductors. Arbitrary isotropic and anisotropic nonparabolic bands as well as p-Ge-type bands are considered. Phonon drag effect are taken account of in an arbitrary nonquantizing magnetic field. Scattering theory is discussed in detail with account taken of the Bloch wave functions effect. Transport phenomena in the quantizing magnetic field are studied as well as the size effects in thin films. Band structures of the semiconductors and semiconductor compounds of interest are also considered.The main part of the book deals with the three important problems: charge carrier statistics in a semiconductor, classical and quantum theory of the electron transport phenomena. All the theoretical results considered as well as the validity conditions are presented in the form which may be directly used to interpret experimental data.

Discovery of new transport phenomena and invention of electron devices through exploitation of these phenomena have caused a great deal of interest in the properties of compound semiconductors in recent years. Extensive re search has been devoted to the accumulation of experimental results, par ticularly about the artificially synthesised compounds. Significant ad vances have also been made in the improvement of the related theory so that the values of the various transport coefficients may be calculated with suf ficient accuracy by taking into account all the complexities of energy band structure and electron scattering mechanisms. Knowledge about these deve lopments may, however, be gathered only from original research contributions, scattered in scientific journals and conference proceedings. Review articles have been published from time to time, but they deal with one particular material or a particular phenomenon and are written at an advanced level. Available text books on semiconductor physics, do not cover the subject in any detail since many of them were written decades ago. There is, there fore, a definite need for a book, giving a comprehensive account of electron transport in compound semiconductors and covering the introductory material as well as the current work. The present book is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature. The first chapter briefly reviews the history of the developement of compound semiconductors and their applications. It is also an introduction to the contents of the book.

This review volume is based primarily on the balance equation approach developed since 1984. It provides a simple and analytical description about hot electron transport, particularly, in semiconductors with higher carrier density where the carrier-carrier collision is much stronger than the single particle scattering. The steady state and time-dependent hot electron transport, thermal noise, hot phonon effect, the memory effect, and other related subjects of charge carriers under strong electric fields are reviewed. The application of Zubarev's nonequilibrium statistical operator to hot electron transport and its equivalence to the balance equation method are also presented. For semiconductors with very low carrier density, the problem can be regarded as a single carrier transport which will be treated non-perturbatively by the nonequilibrium Green's function technique and the path integral theory. The last part of this book consists of a chapter on the dynamic conductivity and the shot noise suppression of a double-carrier resonant tunneling system.

Well-balanced and up-to-date introduction to the field of semiconductor optics, including transport phenomena in semiconductors. Starting with the theoretical fundamentals of this field the book develops, assuming a basic knowledge of solid-state physics. The application areas of the theory covered include semiconductor lasers, detectors, electro-optic modulators, single-electron transistors, microcavities and double-barrier resonant tunneling diodes. One hundred problems with hints for solution help the readers to deepen their knowledge.

This is a classic text of its time in condensed matter physics.

Advances in semiconductor technology have made possible the fabrication of structures whose dimensions are much smaller than the mean free path of an electron. This book gives a thorough account of the theory of electronic transport in such mesoscopic systems. After an initial chapter covering fundamental concepts, the transmission function formalism is presented, and used to describe three key topics in mesoscopic physics: the quantum Hall effect; localisation; and double-barrier tunnelling. Other sections include a discussion of optical analogies to mesoscopic phenomena, and the book concludes with a description of the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism and its relation to the transmission formalism. Complete with problems and solutions, the book will be of great interest to graduate students of mesoscopic physics and nanoelectronic device engineering, as well as to established researchers in these fields.

The area of high field transport in semiconductors has been of interest since the early studies of dielectric breakdown in various materials. It really emerged as a sub-discipline of semiconductor physics in the early 1960's, following the discovery of substantial deviations from Ohm's law at high electric fields. Since that time, it has become a major area of importance in solid state electronics as semiconductor devices have operated at higher frequencies and higher powers. It has become apparent since the Modena Conference on Hot Electrons in 1973, that the area of hot electrons has ex tended weIl beyond the concept of semi-classical electrons (or holes) in homogeneous semiconductor materials. This was exemplified by the broad range of papers presented at the International Conference on Hot Electrons in Semiconductors, held in Denton, Texas, in 1977. Hot electron physics has progressed from a limited phenomeno logical science to a full-fledged experimental and precision theo retical science. The conceptual base and subsequent applications have been widened and underpinned by the development of ab initio nonlinear quantum transport theory which complements and identifies the limitations of the traditional semi-classical Boltzmann-Bloch picture. Such diverse areas as large polarons, pico-second laser excitation, quantum magneto-transport, sub-three dimensional systems, and of course device dynamics all have been shown to be strongly interactive with more classical hot electron pictures.