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 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.

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.