This monograph is concerned with the III-V bulk and low-dimensional semiconductors, with the emphasis on the implications of multi-valley bandstructures for the physical mechanisms essential for opto-electronic devices. The optical response of such semiconductor materials is determined by many-body effects such as screening, gap narrowing, Fermi-edge singularity, electron-hole plasma and liquid formation. Consequently, the discussion of these features reflects such interdependencies with the dynamics of excitons and carriers resulting from intervalley coupling.

The objective of this book is two-fold: to examine key properties of III-V compounds and to present diverse material parameters and constants of these semiconductors for a variety of basic research and device applications. Emphasis is placed on material properties not only of Inp but also of InAs, GaAs and GaP binaries.

Research advances in III-nitride semiconductor materials and device have led to an exponential increase in activity directed towards electronic and optoelectronic applications. There is also great scientific interest in this class of materials because they appear to form the first semiconductor system in which extended defects do not severely affect the optical properties of devices. The volume consists of chapters written by a number of leading researchers in nitride materials and device technology with the emphasis on the dopants incorporations, impurities identifications, defects engineering, defects characterization, ion implantation, irradiation-induced defects, residual stress, structural defects and phonon confinement. This unique volume provides a comprehensive review and introduction of defects and structural properties of GaN and related compounds for newcomers to the field and stimulus to further advances for experienced researchers. Given the current level of interest and research activity directed towards nitride materials and devices, the publication of the volume is particularly timely. Early pioneering work by Pankove and co-workers in the 1970s yielded a metal-insulator-semiconductor GaN light-emitting diode (LED), but the difficulty of producing p-type GaN precluded much further effort. The current level of activity in nitride semiconductors was inspired largely by the results of Akasaki and co-workers and of Nakamura and co-workers in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the development of p-type doping in GaN and the demonstration of nitride-based LEDs at visible wavelengths. These advances were followed by the successful fabrication and commercialization of nitride blue laser diodes by Nakamura et al at Nichia. The chapters contained in this volume constitutes a mere sampling of the broad range of research on nitride semiconductor materials and defect issues currently being pursued in academic, government, and industrial laboratories worldwide.

The frequent use of well known critical data handbooks like Beilstein, Gmelin and Landolt Bornstein is impeded by the fact that merely larger libraries - often far away from the scientist's working place - can afford such precious collections. To satisfy an urgent need of many scientists for having at their working place a comprehensive, high quality, but cheap collection of at least the basic data oftheirfield of interest the series "Data in Science and Technology"is started now. This first volume presents the most important data on two groups of semiconductors, the elements of the IVth group of the periodic system and the III-V compounds. All data were compiled from information on about 2500 pages in various volumes of the New Series of Landolt-Bornstein. For each critically chosen data set and each figure the original literature is cited. In addition, tables of content refer to the handbooks the data were drawn from. Thus the presentation of data in this volume is of the same high quality standard as in the original evaluated data collections. We hope to meet the needs of the physical community with the volumes of the series "Data in Science and Technology", forming bridges between the laboratory and additional information sources in the libraries.