Semiconductors

Abstract

Basic semiconductor physics is treated in many excellent textbooks (Spenke 1965; Smith 1979; Kittel 1976; Grove 1967; and Sze 1981 and 1985), to which the interested reader is referred. For a semiquantitative understanding of detectors a short treatment of the subject is included. It is based on the usual corpuscular descriptions of electrons and holes within the crystals, with parameters such as effective mass, mean free path etc. obtained from a quantum-mechanical treatment of electrons in the periodic potential of the crystal. The quantum-mechanical basis of semiconductor physics will not be dealt with in this text. It can be found in standard literature (see, for example, Spenke 1965 and Wang 1989).