NONEQUILIBRIUM STATISTICAL OPERATOR IN HOT-ELECTRON TRANSPORT THEORY

The Nonequilibrium Statistical Operator method developed by Zubarev is generalized and applied to the study of hot-electron transport in semiconductors. The steady-state balance equations for momentum and energy are derived to the lowest order in the electron-lattice coupling. We show that the derived balance equations are exactly the same as those obtained by Lei and Ting. This equivalence stems from the fact that to the linear order in the electron-lattice coupling, two statistical density matrices have identical effect when they are used to calculate the average value of a dynamical operator. The application to the steady-state and transient hot-electron transport in multivalley semiconductors is also discussed.