Conclusions

Abstract

The phenomena associated with the transport of electrons in compound semiconductors have been described in this book. The theory currently used for explaining these phenomena has also been given. Electrons are taken in this theory as particles with an energy-dependent effective mass, determined by the atomic potentials in the crystal. The low-energy value of the effective mass is treated as an experimentally determined parameter. It is obtained from measurements on transport phenomena exhibiting resonance characteristics cyclotron resonance and magnetophonon resonance. The energy dependence of the effective mass is incorporated in the theory by using the Kane dispersion relation which is derived from the k-p perturbation analysis. According to this relation, the variation is linear in energy and the proportionality constant is approximately the inverse of the energy band gap, which is also an experimentally determined constant. The effective mass, in general, varies with the lattice temperature. The temperature coefficient is taken to be the same as that of the band gap but for some materials experimental values, determined from magnetophonon resonance experiments, are also available [13.1].