Thermal and Plasma Waves in Semiconductors
Date
Authors
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Authors
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Begun in 1973, the Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) is the premier international NDE meeting designed to provide an interface between research and early engineering through the presentation of current ideas and results focused on facilitating a rapid transfer to engineering development.
This site provides free, public access to papers presented at the annual QNDE conference between 1983 and 1999, and abstracts for papers presented at the conference since 2001.
Department
Abstract
The absorption of an intensity modulated laser beam results in a modulated temperature profile having the properties of a critically damped wave, i. e., a thermal wave [1]. In a semiconductor such as silicon, if the energy per photon exceeds the band gap energy, then, in addition to the thermal wave, one has a photo-generated electron-hole plasma density that can also be characterized as a critically damped propagating wave, i. e., a plasma wave [2]. In this paper, we present a theoretical description of these two phenomena that shows how they can be used to obtain information about transport and carrier recombination properties of semiconductors. Included in our analysis will be the effects of linear coupling between heat and mass transport (i. e., thermodiffusion) on the propagation of thermal waves and plasma waves.