Publisher's Synopsis
Any book that covers a large variety of subjects and is written by one author lacks by necessity the depth provided by an expert in his or her own field of specialization. This book is no exception. It has been written with the encouragement of my students and colleagues, who felt that an extensive card file I had accumulated over the years of teaching solid state and semiconductor physics would be helpful to more than just a few of us. This file updated from time l to time, contained lecture notes and other entries that were useful in my research and permitted me to give to my students a broader spectrum of information than is available in typical textbooks. When assembling this material into a book, I divided the topics into material dealing with the homogeneous semiconductor, the sub ject of this book, and the inhomogeneous semiconductor, the latter material left for a future volume. ':In ordelt to keep the book to a manageable size, sections of tutorial character had to be interwoven with others written in shorter, reference style. The pointers at the right-hand page header will assist in discriminating the more diffi cult reference parts of the book from the more easy-to-read basic educational sections. For reference purposes, I included more tables and figures than are necessary for a text, and have added several footnotes that will be helpful in reminding the reader of facts which are often difficult to locate.
