Poole-Frenkel conduction in amorphous solids

Abstract The nature of the electrical conduction process in amorphous solids, using as a basis the ionization of local defects by an applied field, is investigated. It is shown that the Poole-Frenkel effect is a limiting case of a more general analysis that can be extended to cover the experimentally available range of field stress and temperature. At low temperature conduction is by tunnelling emission out of the defects into the quasi-conduction band of the host material whereas at high temperatures thermal emission becomes dominant. Between the two regions a thermal-field emission process has been identified with the characteristic of ln J ∝ T −⅓.