Thermal Transport In Semiconductors

Starting from a broad overview of heat transport based on the Boltzmann Transport Equation, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of heat transport in bulk and nanomaterials based on a kinetic-collective model (KCM). This has become key to understanding the field of thermal transport in semiconductors, and represents an important stride. The book describes how heat transport becomes hydrodynamic at the nanoscale, propagating very much like a viscous fluid and manifesting vorticity and friction-like behavior. It introduces a generalization of Fourier’s law including a hydrodynamic term based on collective behavior in the phonon ensemble. This approach makes it possible to describe in a unifying way recent experiments that had to resort to unphysical assumptions in order to uphold the validity of Fourier’s law, demonstrating that hydrodynamic heat transport is a pervasive type of behavior in semiconductors at reduced scales.

An up-to-date account of theoretical and experimental aspects of heat transport in semiconductors is given in this book. The text outlines diverse heat transport processes and describes salient features of the thermal conductivity of different classes of semiconductors. It also provides hard-to-find coverage of the nonparabolicity of energy bands on electronic thermal conductivity; thermal conduction in amorphous, liquid, and organic semiconductors; magnon thermal conductivity in magnetic materials; and applications of thermal conductivity studies. The book is illustrated.

The 4th edition of this highly successful textbook features copious material for a complete upper-level undergraduate or graduate course, guiding readers to the point where they can choose a specialized topic and begin supervised research. The textbook provides an integrated approach beginning from the essential principles of solid-state and semiconductor physics to their use in various classic and modern semiconductor devices for applications in electronics and photonics. The text highlights many practical aspects of semiconductors: alloys, strain, heterostructures, nanostructures, amorphous semiconductors, and noise, which are essential aspects of modern semiconductor research but often omitted in other textbooks. This textbook also covers advanced topics, such as Bragg mirrors, resonators, polarized and magnetic semiconductors, nanowires, quantum dots, multi-junction solar cells, thin film transistors, and transparent conductive oxides. The 4th edition includes many updates and chapters on 2D materials and aspects of topology. The text derives explicit formulas for many results to facilitate a better understanding of the topics. Having evolved from a highly regarded two-semester course on the topic, The Physics of Semiconductors requires little or no prior knowledge of solid-state physics. More than 2100 references guide the reader to historic and current literature including original papers, review articles and topical books, providing a go-to point of reference for experienced researchers as well.

The book is devoted to nanostructures and nanostructured materials containing both amorphous and crystalline phases with a particular focus on their thermal properties. It is the first time that theoreticians and experimentalists from different domains gathered to treat this subject. It contains two distinct parts; the first combines theory and simulations methods with specific examples, while the second part discusses methods to fabricate nanomaterials with crystalline and amorphous phases and experimental techniques to measure the thermal conductivity of such materials. Physical insights are given in the first part of the book, related with the existing theoretical models and the state of art simulations methods (molecular dynamics, ab-initio simulations, kinetic theory of gases). In the second part, engineering advances in the nanofabrication of crystalline/amorphous heterostructures (heavy ion irradiation, electrochemical etching, aging/recrystallization, ball milling, PVD, laser crystallization and magnetron sputtering) and adequate experimental measurement methods are analyzed (Scanning Thermal Microscopy, Raman, thermal wave methods and x-rays neutrons spectroscopy).

This review volume is based primarily on the balance equation approach developed since 1984. It provides a simple and analytical description about hot electron transport, particularly, in semiconductors with higher carrier density where the carrier-carrier collision is much stronger than the single particle scattering. The steady state and time-dependent hot electron transport, thermal noise, hot phonon effect, the memory effect, and other related subjects of charge carriers under strong electric fields are reviewed. The application of Zubarev's nonequilibrium statistical operator to hot electron transport and its equivalence to the balance equation method are also presented. For semiconductors with very low carrier density, the problem can be regarded as a single carrier transport which will be treated non-perturbatively by the nonequilibrium Green's function technique and the path integral theory. The last part of this book consists of a chapter on the dynamic conductivity and the shot noise suppression of a double-carrier resonant tunneling system.