This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.
The study of electrons and holes confined to two, one and even zero dimensions has uncovered a rich variety of new physics and applications. This book describes the interaction between these confined carriers and the optic and acoustic phonons within and around the confined regions. Phonons provide the principal channel of energy transfer between the carriers and their surroundings and also the main restriction to their room temperature mobility. But they have many other roles; they provide, for example, an essential feature of the operation of the quantum cascade laser. Since their momenta at relevant energies are well matched to those of electrons, they can also be used to probe electronic properties such as the confinement width of 2D electron gases and the dispersion curve of quasiparticles in the fractional quantum Hall effect. The book describes both the physics of the electron-phonon interaction in the different confined systems and the experimental and theoretical techniques that have been used in its investigation. The experimental methods include optical and transport techniques as well as techniques in which phonons are used as the experimental probe. The aim of the book is to provide an up to date review of the physics and its significance in device performance. It is also written to be explanatory
and accessible to graduate students and others new to the field.
1: LJ Challis: Introduction 2: AJ Kent & JK Wigmore: Energy Relaxation by hot two-dimensional carriers in zero magnetic field 3: CJ Mellor, W Dietsche & LJ Challis: Phonon Interactions with magnetically quantized 2D carrier systems: the integer and fractional quantum Hall states 4: SA Cavill, P Hawker & AJ Kent: Carrier-phonon interactions in semiconductor quantum dots and wires 5: R Fletcher, E Zaremba & U Zeitler: Phonon-drag thermopower of low-dimensional systems 6: FF Ouali & LJ Challis: Phonon-assisted tunnelling 7: AV Akimov: Exciton-Phonon Interaction in Quantum Wells 8: MP Blencowe: Quantized Thermal Conductance of Acoustic Phonons in Nanowires
LJ Challis was awarded the Holweck Medal and Prize of Institute of Physics/French Physical Society in 1994, an OBE in 1996 for his services to scientific research and the Phonon Award of International Conference on Phonon Physics (now called the Klemens Award) in 1998. He has connections with a number of societies and journals and has been chairman of various scientific committees, e.g. Physics Committee of SERC, Condensed Matter Division of IOP. He was Editor of 'Reports on Progress in Physics' during 1995-2000.
