Abstract
The effective-mass theory or approximation (EMA), also termed the envelope function approximation, is widely used for calculating the electronic properties of carriers in potentials in an otherwise periodic crystal. The strength of the method is that the complexities of the periodic potential are hidden in the effective-mass tensor m∗ ij . The effective-mass theory is a useful approximation for the treatment of shallow impurities (Sect. 7.5) or quantum wells (Sect. 11.3.2) with a potential that is slowly varying with respect to the scale of the lattice constant.
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References
G.H. Wannier, Phys. Rev. 52, 191 (1937)
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Grundmann, M. (2010). Effective-Mass Theory. In: The Physics of Semiconductors. Graduate Texts in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13884-3_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13884-3_30
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