Charge relaxation and instability in barrier layers

It is shown experimentally that the order of magnitude of the relaxation time of a physical barrier layer is determined by the product of the Maxwell relaxation time and the corresponding exponent. The experiments deal with dielectric dispersion in ferrites and nickel oxide. It is shown that near the relaxation maximum these inhomogeneous semiconductors can be considered as quasihomogeneous. A new treatment of a number of instabilities in barrier layers is presented: low frequency voltage fluctuations in p—n junctions and Schottky barriers, barrier instability, etc.Translated from Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii, Fizika, No. 6, pp. 20–23, June, 1981.