Abstract
Impurities play a pivotal role in semiconductors. One part in a million of phosphorous in silicon alters the conductivity of the latter by several orders of magnitude. Indeed, the information age is possible only because of the unique role of shallow impurities in semiconductors. Although work in semiconductor nanostructures (SN) has been in progress for the past two decades, the role of impurities in them has been only sketchily studied. We outline theoretical approaches to the electronic structure of shallow impurities in SN and discuss their limitations. We find that shallow levels undergo a SHADES (SHAllow-DEep-Shallow) transition as the SN size is decreased. This occurs because of the combined effect of quantum confinement and reduced dielectric constant in SN. Level splitting is pronounced and this can perhaps be probed by ESR and ENDOR techniques. Finally, we suggest that a perusal of literature on (semiconductor) cluster calculations carried out 30 years ago would be useful.
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Singh, V.A., Harbola, M.K. & Pathak, P. Defects in semiconductor nanostructures. Pramana - J Phys 70, 255–261 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-008-0044-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12043-008-0044-x
Keywords
- Dopants
- semiconductor
- defects
- nanostructures
- effective mass theory
- density functional theory
- tight binding