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Aspects of silicon bulk lifetimes

The best lifetimes attained for bulk crytalline silicon as a function of doping concentrations are analyzed. It is assumed that the dopants which set the Fermi level do not contribute to the recombination traffic which is due to the unknown defect. This defect is assumed to have two charge states: neutral and negative, the neutral defect concentration is frozen-in at some temperature T sub f. The higher doping concentrations should include the band-band Auger effect by using a generalization of the Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) mechanism. The generalization of the SRH mechanism is discussed. This formulation gives a straightforward procedure for incorporating both band-band and band-trap Auger effects in the SRH procedure. Two related questions arise in this context: (1) it may sometimes be useful to write the steady-state occupation probability of the traps implied by SRH procedure in a form which approximates to the Fermi-Dirac distribution; and (2) the effect on the SRH mechanism of spreading N sub t levels at one energy uniformly over a range of energies is discussed.

Landsberg, P. T.

Modeling of Optoelectronic Devices

Ultrafast modulation of semiconductor quantum well (QW) laser is of technological importance for information technology. Improvement by order(s) of magnitude in data transfer rate is possible as terahertz (THz) radiation is available for heating the laser at picosecond time scale. Optical gain modulation in the QW is achieved via temperature modulation of electron-hole plasma (EHP). Applications include free-space THz communication, optical switching, and pulse generation. The EHP in the semiconductor QW is described with a two-band model. Semiconductor Bloch equations with many-body effects are used to derive a hydrodynamical model for the active QW region. Because of ultrafast carrier-carrier scatterings in the order of 50 fs, EHP follows quasiequilibrium Fermi-Dirac distributions and THz field interacts incoherently with it. Carrier-longitudinal optical (LO) phonon scatterings and coherent laser-EHP interaction are treated microscopically in our physical model. A set of hydrodynamical equations for plasma density, temperature, and laser envelop amplitude are derived and Runge-Kutta method is adopted for numerical simulation. A typical 8 nm GaAs/Al(0.3)Ga(0.7) As single QW at 300 K is used. Additional information is contained in the original extended abstract.

Li, Jian-Zhong

Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics

The basic thermodynamic properties of gases are reviewed and the relations between them are derived from the first and second laws. The elements of statistical mechanics are then formulated and the partition function is derived. The classical form of the partition function is used to obtain the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of kinetic energies in the gas phase and the equipartition of energy theorem is given in its most general form. The thermodynamic properties are all derived as functions of the partition function. Quantum statistics are reviewed briefly and the differences between the Boltzmann distribution function for classical particles and the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions for quantum particles are discussed.

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