Physics, asked by zpthn7753, 1 year ago

Why is the mass of an electron moving in a semiconductor said to be an "effective mass"?

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Answered by Kingrk
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effective mass (often denoted m*) is the mass that it seems to have when responding to forces, or the mass that it seems to have when interacting with other identical particles in a thermal distribution. One of the results from the band theory of solids is that the movement of particles in a periodic potential, over long distances larger than the lattice spacing, can be very different from their motion in a vacuum. The effective mass is a quantity that is used to simplify band structures by modeling the behavior of a free particle with that mass.
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