Silicon, Circuits, and the Digital Revolution

Introduction to Electronic Band Structure

To continue our path of trying to understand the physics of semiconductors,
we must begin to bring many atoms together to form a solid.

• Pauli exclusion principle still holds!
• Electrons on neighboring atoms "overlap" and must shift energies slightly to that each stays out of the others' states.
  ---- more detailed quantum physics
• Energy levels "blur" into energy bands.

Comments, suggestions, or requests to ghw@udel.edu. "http://www.physics.udel.edu/~watson/scen103/colloq2000/bandstructure.html" Last updated April 19, 2000. © George Watson, Univ. of Delaware, 2000.