Survey of Semiconductor Physics (eBook)

Any book that covers a large variety of subjects and is written by one author lacks by necessity the depth provided by an expert in his or her own field of specialization. This book is no exception. It has been written with the encouragement of my students and colleagues, who felt that an extensive card file I had accumulated over the years of teaching solid state and semiconductor physics would be helpful to more than just a few of us. This file, updated from time to time, contained lecture notes and other entries that were useful in my research and permitted me to give to my students a broader spectrum of information than is available in typical textbooks. When assembling this material into a book, I divided the top- ics into material dealing with the homogeneous semiconductor, the subject of the previously published Volume 1, and the inhomoge- neous semiconductor, the subject of this Volume 2. In order to keep the book to a manageable size, sections of tutorial character which can be used as text for a graduate level class had to be interwoven with others written in shorter, reference style. The pointers at the right-hand page header will assist in distinguishing the more diffi- cult reference parts of the book (with the pointer to the right) from the more easy-to-read basic educational sections (with the pointer tending to the left).