Semiconductors can exhibit electrical instabilities like current runaway, threshold switching, current filamentation, or oscillations, when they are driven far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This book presents a coherent theoretical des- cription of such cooperative phenomena induced by generation and recombination processes of charge carriers in semicon- ductors.

Under certain conditions electrons in a semiconductor become much hotter than the surrounding crystal lattice. When this happens, Ohm's Law breaks down: current no longer increases linearly with voltage and may even decrease. Hot electrons have long been a challenging problem in condensed matter physics and remain important in semiconductor research. Recent advances in technology have led to semiconductors with submicron dimensions, where electrons can be confined to two (quantum well), one (quantum wire), or zero (quantum dot) dimensions. In these devices small voltages heat electrons rapidly, inducing complex nonlinear behavior; the study of hot electrons is central to their further development. This book is the only comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of hot electrons. Intended for both established researchers and graduate students, it gives a complete account of the historical development of the subject, together with current research and future trends, and covers the physics of hot electrons in bulk and low-dimensional device technology. The contributions are from leading scientists in the field and are grouped broadly into five categories: introduction and overview; hot electron-phonon interactions and ultra-fast phenomena in bulk and two-dimensional structures; hot electrons in quantum wires and dots; hot electron tunneling and transport in superlattices; and novel devices based on hot electron transport.

Cooperative Effects in Optics: Superradiance and Phase Transitions presents a systematic treatment of the modern theory of cooperative optical phenomena-processes in which the behavior of many-body systems of radiators or absorbers is essentially determined by their collective interactions with each other. The book focuses on the theory of collective spontaneous radiation (superradiance) and provides a detailed physical explanation of the mechanism of collective spontaneous emission. It considers numerous models of novel nonequilibrium light-induced phase transitions in a typical quantum electronics system, including two-level atoms interacting with the radiation field and more complex systems of three-level atoms, two-bank semiconductors, and other interatomic interactions with the electrostatic and lattice displacement fields. The book uses some of these models for the interpretation of experimentally observed light-induced critical phenomena. Cooperative Effects in Optics is of great value to research workers in the field of cooperative optical phenomena, especially in the determination of the physical essence of theoretical models developed to describe cooperative effects in multi-atomic systems.

This book brings together concepts from semiconductor physics, nonlinear-dynamics and chaos to examine semiconductor transport phenomena.

The field of nonlinear dynamics and low-dimensional chaos has developed rapidly over the past twenty years. The principal advances have been in theoretical aspects but more recent applications in a wide variety of the sciences have been made. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos in Semiconductors is the first book to concentrate on specific physical and ex

Examines the optical properties of low-dimensional semiconductor structures, a hot research area - for graduate students and researchers.

Recent advances in the fabrication of semiconductors have created almost un limited possibilities to design structures on a nanometre scale with extraordinary electronic and optoelectronic properties. The theoretical understanding of elec trical transport in such nanostructures is of utmost importance for future device applications. This represents a challenging issue of today's basic research since it requires advanced theoretical techniques to cope with the quantum limit of charge transport, ultrafast carrier dynamics and strongly nonlinear high-field ef fects. This book, which appears in the electronic materials series, presents an over view of the theoretical background and recent developments in the theory of electrical transport in semiconductor nanostructures. It contains 11 chapters which are written by experts in their fields. Starting with a tutorial introduction to the subject in Chapter 1, it proceeds to present different approaches to transport theory. The semiclassical Boltzmann transport equation is in the centre of the next three chapters. Hydrodynamic moment equations (Chapter 2), Monte Carlo techniques (Chapter 3) and the cellular au tomaton approach (Chapter 4) are introduced and illustrated with applications to nanometre structures and device simulation. A full quantum-transport theory covering the Kubo formalism and nonequilibrium Green's functions (Chapter 5) as well as the density matrix theory (Chapter 6) is then presented.