Balance Equations for Hot Electron Transport in an Arbitrary Energy Band

By distinguishing the center‐of‐mass momentum from its velocity the hot‐electron balance‐equation transport theory developed by Lei and Ting for a parabolic band is extended to carriers moving in a single arbitrary energy band. An ensemble averaged inverse effective mass tensor is introduced to describe the collective response of the Bloch electrons to an external electric field. This allows to use a two‐parameter (the center‐of‐mass momentum and the electron temperature) description of nonlinear carrier transport in a uniform electric field. The resulting effective force and energy balance equations turn out to be so succinct that one can perform any hot‐carrier‐transport calculation for a realistic energy band with only a little more numerical effort than that in the parabolic band cases.