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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The first edition of "Semiconductor Physics" was published in 1973 by Springer-Verlag Wien-New York as a paperback in the Springer Study Edition. In 1977, a Russian translation by Professor Yu. K. Pozhela and coworkers at Vilnius/USSR was published by Izdatelstvo "MIR", Mo scow. Since then new ideas have been developed in the field of semi conductors such as electron hole droplets, dangling bond saturation in amorphous silicon by hydrogen, or the determination of the fine struc ture constant from surface quantization in inversion layers. New tech niques such as molecular beam epitaxy which has made the realization of the Esaki superlattice possible, deep level transient spectroscopy, and refined a. c. Hall techniques have evolved. Now that the Viennese edition is about to go out of print, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York is giving me the opportunity to include these new subjects in a monograph to appear in the Solid-State Sciences series. Again it has been the intention to cover the field of semiconductor physics comprehensively, although some chapters such as diffusion of hot carriers and their galvanomagnetic phenomena, as well as super conducting degenerate semiconductors and the appendices, had to go for commercial reasons. The emphasis is more on physics than on device as pects.