Stress and strain effects

This chapter extends this book’s discussion of bandstructure, band discontinuities and transport—much of the text up to this point—to a manipulation of them through stress and strain. Semiconductors can be strained through a variety of techniques, with strained growth leading to a strained layer, and pattern definition leading to local strained region, being the most common. Strain changes bandstructures and interface bandedge energies, distorts and warps bands, removes degeneracies, affects scattering and thus changes a variety of properties. Following a continuum description of stress-strain relationships, effects of stress—biaxial, hydrostatic and uniaxial—are analyzed for bandstructure and transport in electron bands, light-hole bands, heavy-hole bands and split-off bands in group IV and group III-V semiconductors. Transport effects can be particularly strong in quantum-confined conditions, where changes in density of states can be significant, along with other bandstructure and scattering changes.