Semiconductor/semiconductivity amorphous

As described earlier, the covalently bonded hydrogen, by passivating dangling bond defects and removing strained weak Si—Si bonds from the network, dramatically improves the semiconducting quality of amorphous silicon. Hence without the presence of hydrogen, effective amorphous semiconductor devices such as solar cells or thin film transistors would not be possible. Unfortunately, low defect density, high electronic quality... 

Semiconductors that are used in electrochemical systems often do not meet the ideal conditions on which the Mott-Schottky equation is based. This is particularly true if the semiconductor is an oxide film formed in situ by oxidizing a metal such as Fe or Ti. Such semiconducting films are often amorphous, and contain localized states in the band gap that are spread over a whole range of energies. This may give rise... 

Amorphous selenium glasses, semiconductivity in, 12 587 Amorphous semiconductors, 22 127-141. See also Amorphous silicon (a-Si) amorphous silicon growth for,... 

Various inorganic semiconductors (p-type and/or n-type nonoxide semiconducting materials) sucb as amorphous or crystalline silicon (a-Si or c-Si), gallium arsenide (GaAs), cadmium telluride (CdTe), gallium phosphide (GaP), indium phosphide (InP), copper... 

So far we have outlined the conceptual framework in which we discuss charge transfer in organic semiconductors. It is based on a molecular picture where the molecular unit is considered central, with interactions between molecular units added afterwards. For amorphous molecular solids and for molecular crystals this approach is undisputed. In the case of semiconducting polymers, a conceptually different view has been proposed that starts from a one-dimensional (ID) semiconductor band picture, and that is generally known as the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model [21-24]. 

While considering trends in further investigations, one has to pay special attention to the effect of electroreflection. So far, this effect has been used to obtain information on the structure of the near-the-surface region of a semiconductor, but the electroreflection method makes it possible, in principle, to study electrode reactions, adsorption, and the properties of thin surface layers. Let us note in this respect an important role of objects with semiconducting properties for electrochemistry and photoelectrochemistry as a whole. Here we mean oxide and other films, polylayers of adsorbed organic substances, and other materials on the surface of metallic electrodes. Anomalies in the electrochemical behavior of such systems are frequently explained by their semiconductor nature. Yet, there is a barrier between electrochemistry and photoelectrochemistry of crystalline semiconductors with electronic conductivity, on the one hand, and electrochemistry of oxide films, which usually are amorphous and have appreciable ionic conductivity, on the other hand. To overcome this barrier is the task of further investigations. 

Intense research has in recent years been devoted to noncrystalline materials. It was discovered also that the majority of semiconducting boron-rich borides display several properties that resemble those of the noncrystalline solids. Among the amorphous properties are the temperature and field dependencies of electrical conductivity at low temperature, the temperature dependence of thermal conductivity at high temperatures, and the temperature dependence of the magnetic susceptibility. In addition, the boron-rich semiconductors display crystalline properties, for example, the temperature dependence of the thermal condnctivity at low temperatures, the lattice absorption spectra and the possibility to change... 

There are several materials which exhibit semiconducting behaviour in glassy state and are technologically important for their proven and potential device applications. The most notable of them are the amorphous silicon and a number of chalcogenide and pnictide glasses. In this chapter, we put together briefly the understanding we have of electron transport in such amorphous semiconductors. 

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