Discovery of new transport phenomena and invention of electron devices
through exploitation of these phenomena have caused a great deal of
interest in the properties of compound semiconductors in recent years.
Extensive re- search has been devoted to the accumulation of
experimental results, par- ticularly about the artificially synthesised
compounds. Significant ad- vances have also been made in the improvement
of the related theory so that the values of the various transport
coefficients may be calculated with suf- ficient accuracy by taking into
account all the complexities of energy band structure and electron
scattering mechanisms. Knowledge about these deve- lopments may,
however, be gathered only from original research contributions,
scattered in scientific journals and conference proceedings. Review
articles have been published from time to time, but they deal with one
particular material or a particular phenomenon and are written at an
advanced level. Available text books on semiconductor physics, do not
cover the subject in any detail since many of them were written decades
ago. There is, there- fore, a definite need for a book, giving a
comprehensive account of electron transport in compound semiconductors
and covering the introductory material as well as the current work. The
present book is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature. The first
chapter briefly reviews the history of the developement of compound
semiconductors and their applications. It is also an introduction to the
contents of the book.