Physics and Materials Properties

Since the appearance of our book, Fundamentals of Semiconductors:
Physics and Materials Properties, one of the questions we are asked most frequently is this: “is there a solution manual to this book?” In preparing the questions at the end of each chapter we have already tried to guide the readers to derive the answers by themselves using a step-by-step approach. Clearly this strategy did not work for everyone. We recognize that many of the questions in this book are quite challenging and often require reading of research papers to solve them. In response to readers demand we have de cided to provide solutions to some of the problems in this new edition. Since working through problems is an important and necessary part of the learning process in physics we will not give the solutions to all the problems. Instead,
we hope to use the solutions to a number of selected problems in each chap ter as an additional study help to the readers. We like to use these solutions to provide more in depth discussions to topics which may be too specialized for a typical course on semiconductor physics. By leaving enough unsolved problems and adding a few new ones there are still plenty of opportunities for both the instructors to choose problems for assignments and for students to test their understanding of the text. We like to point out that, even if the solution can be found in this manual, there is usually more than one way to solve a given problem. Conscientious students should always ask whether there is a better way to solve a problem than the one we have provided in this manual.