BOOKS AND MEDIA

Q&A Dopants and Defects in

Prof. Adam Micolich
University of New South Wales, Australia
Prof. Adam Micolich is a researcher
based at the University of New South
Wales, specializing in the study of
semiconductor systems. Materials
Today recently spoke to Adam for our
podcast.
MT: When did your interest in science
begin?
AM: Hard to say, but it was early. My
parents say I was inquisitive from very
young, I had my first electronics kit at
8, and I really got into science classes in
high school. It pretty much followed from
there. The move towards physics came
about when my parent’s got me a physics
kit instead of a chemistry kit for my 14th
birthday thinking it would be less likely for
me to blow the house up.
MT: What’s the one piece of advice you
would give to any researchers that are just
starting off?
AM: Work on developing your skills outside
the lab. Being able to communicate well is
as vital to survival as doing great science,
sometimes more so.
MT: What would you say is the most
rewarding part of your job?
AM: Doing or finding something that no
one else has before, particularly if it might
be controversial, and when people outside
academia see the interest in something that
you’ve done. It’s great when the taxpayers
see something for their investment, even
if it’s just answered curiosity; open access
science is really important for this.
MT: Which scientists have inspired you?
AM: Do they have to be real? I was a
huge MacGyver fan as a child, definitely
a big inspiration for playing around with
gadgets. In terms of real scientists, I’d
probably say Richard Feynman, his way
of thinking just makes so much sense to
me. And more recently, Max Delbruck;
skipping out of the popular topic at the
time, quantum mechanics, to go work at
the outer edge of physics must have taken
courage. It’s hard not to follow the herd, as
much in science as in the rest of life.
To hear more from Adam, as well as
a plethora of speakers from academia
and industry, visit our podcast page at
www.materialstoday.com/podcasts or
search for Materials Today on iTunes.
Semiconductors
The book attempts to provide a bridge between a typical solid state
physics course and the real world of research in semiconductor physics.
It strives to include both experimental characterization and fundamental
theoretical aspects and to treat defects and doping at the same level.
Prof. Walter Lambrecht | Case Western Reserve University | wxl2@cwru.edu
This book grew out of a popular graduate course taught by
Prof. Eugene Haller at UC Berkeley and taken as a student
by the co-author Matthew McCluskey, now himself a
professor at Washington State University after several
years of experience in an industrial research setting.
It is organized in three introductory chapters on
semiconductor basics, defect classification, crystal
growth, followed by chapters examining various
properties or phenomena: electronic,
vibrational, optical, thermal. Finally
it examines different types of
characterization methods.
Although each chapter is short, it
touches upon a broad array of topics,
many in the form of examples. The
authors tend to take the simplest
approach possible to explain the basic
phenomenon at hand, avoiding more
technically oriented presentations.
Most chapters start from the basic
models one would find in textbooks
and subsequently elaborate them. For
example, the chapter on electronic
properties of defects starts from the
well-known hydrogenic model in the
effective mass approximation, which is covered in most
textbooks. However, extensions of this model, such as
the anisotropic mass tensor, inter-valley coupling and
the valence band degeneracy, not typically found in
solid state textbooks, are included. It uses the group-
theoretical description of symmetry without requiring
the reader to have a full grasp of group theory.
So, the book gives the reader a casual walk through
some of the topics, brushing in a few broad strokes
over extensive areas of research to bring him/her up to
speed on the most recent topics currently under debate,
but does not give much depth. For example, in another
popular book on “Fundamentals of Semiconductors,” by
Cardona and Yu each of the above main topics would
have been a full chapter with examples, problems, etc.
On the other hand, this lack of depth is somewhat
counterbalanced by a large set of references, essentially
suggestions for further reading, at the end of each
chapter. The book goes indeed beyond the usual textbook
in that it provides more specific examples of real world
defect physics, such as DX centers, donor-acceptor pair
transitions, local vibrational modes, Jahn-Teller distortion
around vacancies and a wide range of characterization
methods. The book contains a lot of factual information
in a mostly descriptive manner. It gives the newcomer
to the field an idea of the collective knowledge of
researchers who have worked in this field for some years
but would not necessarily give him the tools to move
beyond it in his/her own research. It teaches largely
by example rather than by an organized approach to
the tools needed to fully understand
each topic. Given the background of
the authors, it is no surprise that the
chapters on crystal growth are the
most in-depth. Its weaker points are the
description of computational methods.
For example, the description of what it
calls the Green’s function method does
not even define the Green’s function
and gives basically only a conceptual
perturbation theoretical framework. On
the other hand, it nicely describes the
concepts of defect energy of formation
as function of chemical potentials and
Fermi level for different charge states
and the concept of transition levels in
the chapter on thermal properties.
Matthew D. McCluskey and Eugene E. Haller
Dopants and Defects in Semiconductors
CRC Press · 2012 · 390 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-43983-152-6
£63.99
The book will be most useful for beginning graduate
students in materials science. It will allow them to
broaden their horizons and enable them to get more
out of semiconductor oriented conferences. All too
often the abundance of topics that speakers take for
granted as common knowledge in their audience can be
overwhelming for a newcomer. So, if you want to obtain
an easy reading broad introductory overview of the
field, this book is for you, but if you want to get a more
in-depth reference work, I think there are better books
out there for you, such as Lannoo and Bourgouin’s two
volume book on “Point Defects in Semiconductors,” or,
Stoneham’s monumental “Theory of Defects in Solids,”
or you will have to dig into the extensive further reading
suggestions of each chapter.

JULY-AUGUST 2012 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 7-8 349