Hopping Transport in Solids

Book excerpt: The hopping process, which differs substantially from conventional transport processes in crystals, is the central process in the transport phenomena discussed in this book. Throughout the book the term ``hopping'' is defined as the inelastic tunneling transfer of an electron between two localized electronic states centered at different locations. Such processes do not occur in conventional electronic transport in solids, since localized states are not compatible with the translational symmetry of crystals.The rapid growth of interest in hopping transport has followed in the footsteps of the development of physics of disordered systems during the last three decades. The intense interest in disordered solids can be attributed to the technological potential of the new noncrystalline materials, as well as to new fundamental problems discovered in solid state physics when a crystal is no longer translationally symmetric.In the last decade hopping systems such as organic polymers, biological materials, many oxide glasses, mesoscopic systems, and the new high-temperature superconducting materials in their normal state have attracted much interest. New phenomena investigated recently include interference and coherent scattering in variable range hopping conduction, mesoscopic effects, relaxation processes and thermo-electric power, and thermal conductivity caused by hopping transport. This volume presents the reader with a thorough overview of these recent developments, written by leading experts in the various fields.