LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims to: describe a wide range of techniques and experimental data relating to thermal, thermoelectric and electrical properties, to provide the basic interpretative models for their understanding and to define the characteristic parameters of the materials.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The specific educational objective of this module is to make the student acquire the skills necessary to be able to analyze experimental measures of transport properties and to be able to derive from them fundamental characteristics of the material measured. At the end of the module the student will also have acquired the basics of various methods of preparation and characterization of materials such as lamination, thin film deposition, X-ray diffractometry or resistivity and Hall effect measurements.

TEACHING METHODS

lectures on the blackboard with the aid of powerpoint presentations to illustrate measurement techniques and experimental data

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

- free electron model and Drude model. Application to experimental measurements of electrical properties in metals.

- Sommerfeld model

- derivation of the band structure in a solid. Example of a semiconductor material

- characteristics of a semiconductor material. Electrons and holes, two-band Drude model

- dependence of resistivity on temperature. Bloch Gruneisen

Laboratory activities

4-wire resistance measurement and determination of the most important experimental errors in a resistivity measurement Lamination of copper specimens with different defect density and measurement of resistivity as a function of temperature Measurement of carrier density in a conductive material by means of Hall effect experiments

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kittel - Introduction to solid state physics

Aschroft and Mermin - Solid state physics