The EEM in Ultrathin Films (UFs) of Nonparabolic Semiconductors

Abstract

The concept of the effective mass of the carriers in semiconductors is one of the basic pillars in the realm of solid state and related sciences [1]. It must be noted that among the various definitions of the effective electron mass (e.g effective acceleration mass, density-of-state effective mass, concentration effective mass, conductivity effective mass, Faraday rotation effective mass, etc) [2], it is the effective momentum mass that should be regarded as the basic quantity [3]. This is due to the fact that it is this mass which appears in the description of transport phenomena and all other properties of the conduction electrons in a semiconductor with arbitrary band nonparabolicity [3]. It can be shown that it is the effective momentum mass which enters in various transport coefficients and plays the most dominant role in explaining the experimental results of different scattering mechanisms through Boltzmann’s transport equation [4,5]. The carrier degeneracy in semiconductors influences the effective mass when it is energy dependent.