Nonequilibrium hot charge carriers play a crucial role in the physics and technology of semiconductor nanostructure devices. This book, one of the first on the topic, discusses fundamental aspects of hot carriers in quasi-two-dimensional systems and the impact of these carriers on semiconductor devices. The work will provide scientists and device engineers with an authoritative review of the most exciting recent developments in this rapidly moving field. It should be read by all those who wish to learn the fundamentals of contemporary ultra-small, ultra-fast semiconductor devices. - Topics covered include - Reduced dimensionality and quantum wells - Carrier-phonon interactions and hot phonons - Femtosecond optical studies of hot carrier - Ballistic transport - Submicron and resonant tunneling devices

This research and reference text provides up-to-date coverage of the latest research on hot carriers in semiconductors, with a focus on the background, theoretical approaches, measurements and physical understanding required to engage with the field. Pitched at an introductory level, it equips researchers transitioning from optics to fully understand the role of hot carriers in semiconductors, and is a core text for graduate courses in hot carrier phenomena.

This volume contains invited and contributed papers of the Ninth International Conference on Hot Carriers in Semiconductors (HCIS-9), held July 3 I-August 4, 1995 in Chicago, Illinois. In all, the conference featured 15 invited oral presentations, 60 contributed oral presentations, and 105 poster presentations, and an international contingent of 170 scientists. As in recent conferences, the main themes of the conference were related to nonlinear transport in semiconductor heterojunctions and included Bloch oscillations, laser diode structures, and femtosecond spectroscopy. Interesting questions related to nonlinear transport, size quantization, and intersubband scattering were addressed that are relevant to the new quantum cascade laser. Many lectures were geared toward quantum wires and dots and toward nanostructures and mesoscopic systems in general. It is expected that such research will open new horizons to nonlinear transport studies. An attempt was made by the program committee to increase the number of presen tations related directly to devices. The richness of nonlocal hot electron effects that were discussed as a result, in our opinion, suggests that future conferences should further encourage reports on such device research. On behalf of the Program and International Advisory Committees, we thank the participants, who made the conference a successful and pleasant experience, and the support of the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, and the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We are also indebted to Mrs. Sara Starkey and Mrs.

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.

A comprehensive, detailed description of the properties and behaviour of mesoscopic devices.

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.