Amots, no need for you to come to my defense. If I really wanted to get into the nit picking, I would have explained that in order to get a band structure established in an agglomeration of atoms you need at least few tens if not few hundreds of atoms organized with a repetitive symmetry and the critical parameter is the period of this symmetry which happen to be correlated very nicely to the lattice parameter rather than the covalent diameter of each atom (which is in the case of silicon, is pretty close to 2.2 A and certainly not 1 A as mentioned in Joe's first "hearsay" on the subject).
In any event, thank you for your kind comment.
And Joe, just because we do not agree on some basic economical tennets it does not mean you must disagree with everything I say. In case you forgot the name of the poor chap that first found tunneling through "barriers" it was Izaka (and GE was the first to produce Izaka diodes, latter know as tunnel diodes, I happened to have used some of the few first batches in the early sixties). I did not say Josephson was the first, I just mentioned that tunnelling exists. I do not even want to go into small polarons and hopping electrons, that will get us into Mott insulators and from there, who knows where we will end up (Mohan, are you bored enough?<G>).
As I said before, if you are interested, we could take this off thread.
Zeev |
