Abstract
Magnetooptical studies provide a powerful tool for the study of the electronic structure of semimetals because of the low effective masses characteristic of this class of materials and because of the consequent ease of satisfying the conditions ωcτ > 1 and ħωc > kT, which are necessary requirements for the observation of resonant magnetooptical effects. The condition (ωCτ > 1 (where ωc is the angular cyclotron frequency \({\omega _{\text{c}}}{\mkern 1mu} = {\mkern 1mu} {\text{eH/m}}_{\text{c}}^*{\text{c, m}}_{\text{c}}^*\) is the cyclotron effective mass and τ is the relaxation time), implies that an electron or hole complete a cyclotron orbit before being scattered. The condition ħωc > kT implies that the characteristic magnetic energy ħωC is large compared with thermal energies, so that distinct Landau levels can be resolved when in competition with thermal broadening effects. In fact, over the years, semimetals have provided important test materials for the development of experimental magnetooptical techniques, as well as theoretical models for quantitative analysis of the experimental results.
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References
Proc. Int. Conf. Phys. Semimetals and Narrow Gap Semiconductors, ed. D.L. Carter and R.T. Bate (Pergamon Press, New York, 1971), p. 1-193.
IBM J. Res. and Develop, 8 (1964).
E.E. Mendez, Ph.D. thesis, MIT, June 1979 (unpublished).
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Dresselhaus, M.S. (1980). Magnetooptical Studies of the Electronic Structure of Semimetals. In: Devreese, J.T. (eds) Theoretical Aspects and New Developments in Magneto-Optics. Nato Advanced Study Institutes Series, vol 60. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0454-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0454-6_3
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