Electron—phonon scattering

Static defects scatter elastically the charge carriers. Electrons do not loose memory of the phase contained in their wave function and thus propagate through the sample in a coherent way. By contrast, electron-phonon or electron-electron collisions are inelastic and generally destroy the phase coherence. The resulting inelastic mean free path, Li , which is the distance that an electron travels between two inelastic collisions, is generally equal to the phase coherence length, the distance that an electron travels before its initial phase is destroyed ... 

These carriers of heat do not move balistically from the hotter part of the material to the colder one. They are scattered by other electrons, phonons, defects of the lattice and impurities. The result is a diffusive process which, in the simplest form, can be described as a gas diffusing through the material. Hence, the thermal conductivity k can be written as ... 

The main scattering processes limiting the thermal conductivity are phonon-phonon (which is absent in the harmonic approximation), phonon defect, electron-phonon, electron impurity or point defects and more rare electron-electron. For both heat carriers, the thermal resistivity contributions due to the various scattering processes are additive. For... 

Since the number of phonons increases with temperature, the electron-phonon and phonon-phonon scattering are temperature dependent. The number of defects is temperature independent and correspondingly, the mean free path for phonon defect and electron defect scattering does not depend on temperature. 

At high temperatures (T > 20K), the electron-phonon scattering is dominant and k decreases with T. Hence, we find a maximum of thermal conductivity (see Figs 3.16, 3.19 and 3.20) which is around 10 K for pure metals and 40 K for alloys. For example, in the case of A11050 A1 alloy, where the thermal conduction is mainly due to electrons ... 

Bulk silicon is a semiconductor with an indirect band structure, as schematically shown in Fig. 7.12 c. The top of the VB is located at the center of the Brillouin zone, while the CB has six minima at the equivalent (100) directions. The only allowed optical transition is a vertical transition of a photon with a subsequent electron-phonon scattering process which is needed to conserve the crystal momentum, as indicated by arrows in Fig. 7.12 c. The relevant phonon modes include transverse optical phonons (TO 56 meV), longitudinal optical phonons (LO 53.5 meV) and transverse acoustic phonons (TA 18.7 meV). At very low temperature a splitting (2.5 meV) of the main free exciton line in TO and LO replicas can be observed [Kol5]. 

With the availability of lasers, Brillouin scattering can now be used more confidently to study electron-phonon interactions and to probe the energy, damping and relative weight of the various hydro-dynamic collective modes in anharmonic insulating crystals.The connection between the intensity and spectral distribution of scattered light and the nuclear displacement-displacement correlation function has been extensively discussed by Griffin 236). 

Influence of Temporary Electron Trapping on Quasi-Elastic Scattering and Phonon Creation... 

An elementary treatment of the free-electron motion (see, e.g., Kittel, 1962, pp. 107-109) shows that the damping constant is related to the average time t between collisions by y = 1 /t. Collision times may be determined by impurities and imperfections at low temperatures but at ordinary temperatures are usually dominated by interaction of the electrons with lattice vibrations electron-phonon scattering. For most metals at room temperature y is much less than oip. Plasma frequencies of metals are in the visible and ultraviolet hu>p ranges from about 3 to 20 eV. Therefore, a good approximation to the Drude dielectric functions at visible and ultraviolet frequencies is... 

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