Talk:Thermal ionization

semiconductors too

At some point this article could be generalized to include semiconductor physics. The physics of thermal ionization of atoms in a hot vacuum is closely related to the thermal ionization of dopant atoms in a semiconductor. The differences are

• In semiconductor the ions are locked into a lattice, not free to roam about, and so complex plasma phenomena such as Debye layers don't occur (anyway such physics is not discussed in this article).
• The ionization energies of shallow donor dopants can be very low, (measured in millielectronvolts). Electron affinities of shallow acceptor dopants are quite high (close to band gap). As a result one expects practically all dopants to be ionized in a semiconductor even at room temperature.
• In the semiconductor the electrostatic environment is a bit more complex to think about because there is also a valence band, and so negatively ionized dopants can be compensated with electron holes.

Anyway, things like Langmuir-Saha equation appear in both cases. Nanite (talk) 18:29, 29 January 2014 (UTC)