Tunneling in Insulators

For last couple of years a big research project in our group has been studying CaF₂ nanostructures on Si(111) surfaces. We use Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy to study these structures, and CaF₂ happens to be an insulator, so incidentally we had to try some simple model calculations of tunneling through thin insulator films. You can follow the link below to see a detailed write-up on this project.

As luck would have it, in my Advanced Solid State Physics class part of our coursework was to write up some "lecture notes" on Zener's theory of electrical breakdown in insulators, which has a lot to do with tunneling. The work that I had to do really amounted in this case to digesting the original paper by Zener and Wills (Proc. Roy. Soc. A, 524, 523 (1934)) and making up a couple of figures, but since the result is relevant for my research, I decided to link a copy of these "notes" to this page.

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