Electron-phonon interaction in tetrahedral semiconductors

Abstract Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the field of ab initio calculations of electronic band structures of semiconductors and insulators. The one-electron states (and the concomitant two-particle excitations) have been obtained without adjustable parameters, with a high degree of reliability. Also, more recently, the electron–hole excitation frequencies responsible for optical spectra have been calculated. These calculations, however, are performed with the constituent atoms fixed in their crystallographic positions and thus neglect the effects of the lattice vibrations (i.e. electron–phonon interaction) which can be rather large, even larger than the error bars assumed for ab initio calculations. Effects of electron–phonon interactions on the band structure can be experimentally investigated in detail by measuring the temperature dependence of energy gaps or critical points (van Hove singularities) of the optical excitation spectra. These studies have been complemented in recent years by observing the dependence of such spectra on isotopic mass whenever different stable isotopes of a given atom are available at affordable prices. In crystals composed of different atoms, the effect of the vibration of each separate atom can thus be investigated by isotopic substitution. Because of the zero-point vibrations, such effects are present even at zero temperature ( T =0). In this paper, we discuss state-of-the-art calculations of the dielectric function spectra and compare them with experimental results, with emphasis on the differences introduced by the electron–phonon interaction. The temperature dependence of various optical parameters will be described by means of one or two (in a few cases three) Einstein oscillators, except at the lowest temperatures where the T 4 law (contrary to the Varshni T 2 result) will be shown to apply. Increasing an isotopic mass increases the energy gaps, except in the case of monovalent Cu (e.g. CuCl) and possibly Ag (e.g. AgGaS 2 ). It will be shown that the gaps of tetrahedral materials containing an element of the first row of the periodic table (C,N,O) are strongly affected by the electron–phonon interaction. It will be conjectured that this effect is related to the superconductivity recently observed in heavily boron-doped carbon.