Time Tu Th 10:55 -12:10, 618 VAN

Instructor Craig Pryor
303 VAN
335-0099
craig-pryor@uiowa.edu

Office Hours Tu 2-3, Wed 1-2, Th 3-4 or by appointment

Course Description This course will cover the electronic, optical, and (to a slightly lesser extent) mechanical properties of bulk semiconductors, as well as heterostructures. You should be familiar with quantum mechanics at the graduate level (029:245/246) and solid state physics at the undergraduate level (029:193).

Text Fundamentals of Semiconductors by P. Yu and M. Cardona, 3rd ed. The authors maintain a web site for their book here, containing numerous errata as well as solutions for some of the exercises.

Homework There will be weekly assignments, and credit for late homework is given with a half-life of 1 day.

Exams Two in-class midterms (dates TBA).

Presentation At the end of the semester, each student will make a 15 minute presentation on a published paper. The paper chosen should have some connection with the material we cover in class.

Grading Homework: 45% Midterms: 40% Class presentation: 15%

Homework Assignements
NOTE: problems are from the 3rd edition of Yu and Cardona, which are not the same as the problems in the 2nd edition
  1. Yu and Cardona, Chap. 2 problems 2, 3, 4, 5 [note the last problem was changed from 7 to 5] (due Tuesday Jan. 27)
  2. Write a program to reduce a group representation (as specified by its character table) to a sum of irreducible representations. The program should work from a user-supplied character table that can be easily changed. Use your program to generate a table like table 2.11 in Yu and Cardona , but of tensor products of all pairs of representations of O_h. The character table for O_h is given in table 2.7 in Yu and Cardona.
  3. Yu and Cardona, Chap. 2 problems 14 and 16. >>>>>>Due THURSDAY Feb. 12
  4. Yu and Cardona, Chap. 3 problems 2,3,4. Due Thursday Feb. 19
  5. Yu and Cardona, Chap. 4 problems 1,2,3. Due Tuesday March 3.
  6. Yu and Cardona, Chap 5, problems 1,2,4. Due Tuesday, March 24