Advanced Physics of Electron Transport in Semiconductors and Nanostructures

This textbook is aimed at second-year graduate students in Physics, Electrical Engineering, or Materials Science. It presents a rigorous introduction to electronic transport in solids, especially at the nanometer scale.Understanding electronic transport in solids requires some basic knowledge of Hamiltonian Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Condensed Matter Theory, and Statistical Mechanics. Hence, this book discusses those sub-topics which are required to deal with electronic transport in a single, self-contained course. This will be useful for students who intend to work in academia or the nano/ micro-electronics industry.Further topics covered include: the theory of energy bands in crystals, of second quantization and elementary excitations in solids, of the dielectric properties of semiconductors with an emphasis on dielectric screening and coupled interfacial modes, of electron scattering with phonons, plasmons, electrons and photons, of the derivation of transport equations in semiconductors and semiconductor nanostructures somewhat at the quantum level, but mainly at the semi-classical level. The text presents examples relevant to current research, thus not only about Si, but also about III-V compound semiconductors, nanowires, graphene and graphene nanoribbons. In particular, the text gives major emphasis to plane-wave methods applied to the electronic structure of solids, both DFT and empirical pseudopotentials, always paying attention to their effects on electronic transport and its numerical treatment. The core of the text is electronic transport, with ample discussions of the transport equations derived both in the quantum picture (the Liouville-von Neumann equation) and semi-classically (the Boltzmann transport equation, BTE). An advanced chapter, Chapter 18, is strictly related to the 'tricky' transition from the time-reversible Liouville-von Neumann equation to the time-irreversible Green's functions, to the density-matrix formalism and, classically, to the Boltzmann transport equation. Finally, several methods for solving the BTE are also reviewed, including the method of moments, iterative methods, direct matrix inversion, Cellular Automata and Monte Carlo. Four appendices complete the text.

Comprehensive treatment of electronic structure of and transport in solids including nanostructures Includes a historical perspective on the evolution of quantum theory and how it has shaped our knowledge of electrons in crystals Rigorous mathematical development is supplemented by numerical and computational methodologies which convey a practical understanding of the challenges and successes of using quantum mechanics for real world applications Exercises for students, based on homework problems assigned by the authors, and suggested reading will be included Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext
Massimo V. Fischetti is a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and a distinguished chair at Texas Instruments in Nanoelectronics. William Vandenberghe is also at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Inhalt
Part I A Brief Review of Classical and Quantum Mechanics.- Part II Crystals and Electronic Properties of Solids.- Part III Second Quantization and Elementary Excitations in Solids.- Part IV Electron Scattering in Solids.- Part V Electronic Transport.