Physikalisches Kolloquium: Isotope Effects on the Thermal Properties of Some Semiconductors

Abstract

Over the last two decades affordable quantities of highly enriched stable isotopes of many elements have become available. These can be used to grow isotope enriched crystals of current semiconductors enabling to study isotope effects on a multitude of physical properties.

In my lecture I report about iostope effects on the thermal conductivity of Si, the phonon systems and the low-temperature specific heats of some current binary and ternary semiconductors where isotope effects have been employed to test the quality of modern ab initio DFT codes in predicting the lattice properties of semiconductors.