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.

Recently, there has been a considerable upsurge of interest in heavily doped semiconductors. This interest is due primarily to the expanding range of applications of such. materials. Moreover, the heavy doping of semiconductors produces new effects (the forma tion of impurity aggregates, the appearance of allowed states in the forbidden band, etc J, which are of great interest in solid-state physics. The rapid growth in the number of papers on heavily doped semiconductors makes it difficult to review the results obtained so far. Therefore, many investigations carried out in 1966-7, par ticularly those on AIIIBV semiconductors, are not discussed in the present monograph, which represents the state of the knowledge in 1965. Nevertheless, the author hopes that, in spite of this, the book will be useful. An attempt is made, first, to review investigations of heavily doped semiconductors from a certain viewpoint and, sec ondly, to suggest some ideas (Chap. 5) which may be controversial but which are intended to stimulate further studies of heavily doped semiconductors which can be regarded as a special case of dis ordered systems. The work of American scientists investigating heavily doped semiconductors, in particular the efforts of E. O. Kane, J. 1. Pan kove, R. N. Hall, R. A. Logan, W. G. Spitzer, F. A. Trumbore, and many others, is well known to Soviet investigators. It gives me pleasure to learn that Western readers will now have an - v vi PREFACE portunity to become acquainted with the work done in the USSR.

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.