Effect of Shear on Impurity Conduction inn-Type Germanium

Abstract

Shear strains, which change the donor wave functions, greatly affect impurity conduction, which depends sensitively on the wave function overlap of neighboring impurity states. The change of impurity conduction of germanium containing 5.2×${10}^{15}$ antimony atoms per cc and about 3% compensation was measured at 1.9°K as a function of shear strains produced by uniaxial tension and compression along [110]. It is shown that the anisotropy and the saturation of the conductivity changes observed at stresses larger than 4×${10}^8$ dynes/${\mathrm{cm}}^2$ can be understood from the strain-induced changes of the donor state wave functions.