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...

Optoelectronics and electronics of the years to come are likely to change dramatically. Most of the outdoor lighting systems will be replaced by light-emitting diodes that operate in the whole visible part of the electromagnatic spectrum. Transistors operating at high frequency and with high power are under development and likely to hit the market very rapidly. Compact solid-state lasers that operate in the near-ultraviolet range are going to be utilized for such widely used applications as read-write tasks in printer and CD drives. Ultraviolet detectors will be used at a wide scale for many...

This textbook combines a thorough theoretical treatment of the basic physics of semiconductors with applications to practical devices by putting special emphasis on the physical principles upon which these devices operate. Topics treated are the detailed band structure of semiconductors, the effect of impurities on electronic states, and semiconductor statistics. Also discussed are lattice dynamical, transport, and surface properties as well as optical, magneto-optical, and electro-optical properties. The applied part of the book treats p-n junctions, bipolar junction transistors,...

Over the last 25 years, the performances of semiconductor devices have improved greatly; this book describes the science and technology that have made these advances possible. While mainstream silicon memory and microprocessor chips still work with uniform silicon as the starting point, the whole of both electronic and optical communication relies on multilayer semiconductor structures. The book provides a unified overview of the devices, including the relevant quantum physics and the key breakthroughs in materials science and technology. It is suitable as a text for undergraduates and...

Semiconductor sensors patterned at the micron scale combined with custom-designed integrated circuits have revolutionized semiconductor radiation detector systems. Designs covering many square meters with million of signal channels are now commonplace in high-energy physics and the technology is finding its way into many other fields, ranging from astrophysics to experiments at synchrotron light sources and medical imaging. This book is the first to present a comprehensive discussion of the many facets of highly integrated semiconductor detectors systems, covering sensors, signal processing,...

Nowadays information technology is based on semiconductor and feromagnetic materials. Information processing and computation are based on electron charge in semiconductor transistors and integrated circuits, and information is stored on magnetic high-density hard disks based on the physics of the electron spins. Recently, a new branch of physics and nanotechnology, called magneto-electronics, spintronics or spin electronics, has emerged, which aims at simultaneously exploiting both the charge and the spin of electrons in the same device. A broader goal is to develop new functionality that...

Intense Terahertz Excitation of Semiconductors presents the first comprehensive treatment of high-power terahertz applications to semiconductors and low-dimensional semiconductor structures. Terahertz properties of semiconductors are in the center of scientific activities because of the need of high-speed electronics. This research monograph bridges the gap between microwave physics and photonics. It focuses on a core topic of semiconductor physics providing a full description of the state of the art of the field.
The reader is introduced to new physical phenomena which occur in the...

Rapid development of microfabrication and assembly of nanostructures has opened up many opportunities to miniaturize structures that confine light, producing unusual and extremely interesting optical properties. Microcavities addresses the large variety of optical phenomena taking place in confined solid state structures: microcavities. Realisations include planar and pillar microcavities, whispering gallery modes, and photonic crystals. The microcavities represent a unique laboratory for quantum optics and photonics. They exhibit a number of beautiful effects including lasing, superfluidity,...

This book focuses on the main aspects of electron and nuclear spin dynamics in semiconductor nanostructures. It summarizes main results of theoretical and experimental studies of interactions in spin systems, effects of ultrafast spin manipulation by light, phenomena of spin losses, and the physics of the omnipresent spin noise.