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Soft matter physics studies the physical behaviour of soft matter, including its response to mechanical and thermal perturbations.

A flexible silicone polymer that can form an elastomer when lightly crosslinked. The network's recoverable deformation provides an example of rubber elasticity.

A power spectral density distributes the mean square of a signal over frequency. Its integral over the specified frequency domain gives that mean square. State whether the convention is one-sided or two-sided and whether frequency is measured in hertz or as angular frequency. For a zero-mean stationary signal, the mean square is its variance; spectral density of a stationary process gives the discrete-time convention.

A signal-to-noise ratio compares a chosen measure of a signal with the corresponding noise measure. For a constant measured electric potential difference $V$ and a root mean square noise voltage $v_n$, an amplitude ratio is $|V|/v_n$; the corresponding power ratio under equal electrical resistance is its square. State the convention and measurement signal bandwidth, since changing either changes the numerical ratio.

An oocyte is a female germ biological cell developing toward an ovum.

A quantum well confines a particle in one spatial direction while allowing motion along the layer. In a semiconductor heterostructure, band offsets can create that confinement. The following finite square well model makes the resulting discrete transverse energy levels explicit.

A double heterostructure sandwiches one semiconductor between two layers of another, for example gallium arsenide between aluminium gallium arsenide layers. Suitable band offsets confine injected charge carriers centrally.^[ref]

A heterojunction joins different semiconductors; its two sides need not have opposite semiconductor doping.^[ref]

An intermediate layer used to prepare the growth of a later layer by epitaxy; it need not eliminate the lattice mismatch.

A difference between the in-plane lattice spacings of joined crystals, which can cause strain and crystal defects during epitaxy.

A semiconductor whose mobile charge carrier population requires Fermi-Dirac statistics rather than a dilute Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. In a strongly degenerate n-type semiconductor, the Fermi level lies inside the conduction band; in a strongly degenerate p-type semiconductor, it lies inside the valence band. The occupied and empty quantum states on opposite sides of a tunnel diode can then overlap in energy. Heavy semiconductor doping both changes these occupations and narrows the depletion region; a narrow barrier and accessible final quantum states serve different roles.

A p-type semiconductor has more mobile electron holes than electrons; it can nevertheless be electrically neutral overall.

An n-type semiconductor has more mobile electrons than electron holes. The letter describes the predominant mobile charge carriers, not a net negative electric charge of the whole material.

An impurity level is an electronic energy level associated with a dopant or defect in a semiconductor. A shallow donor impurity introduces a level just below the conduction band, and a shallow acceptor impurity introduces one just above the valence band. Under electrostatic band bending, these levels shift with the local band edges in the same material; their occupation is determined relative to the equilibrium chemical potential.

At sufficiently low temperature, donor or acceptor ionization becomes energetically unfavourable. Carriers remain bound to dopants rather than contributing to conduction, reducing the mobile carrier density. This dopant freeze-out is distinct from the high-temperature intrinsic regime, where thermal excitation across the band gap overwhelms the net dopant contribution.

An intrinsic semiconductor has electron and hole densities $n=p=n_i$, so ${\sigma }_i=e{n}_i({\mu }_e+{\mu }_h)$. In a fully ionised, uncompensated n-type sample with $N_D\gg n_i$, $n\simeq N_D$, $p\simeq n_i^2/N_D$, andThus a carrier-density ratio alone is not generally the electrical conductivity ratio. If electron mobility is unchanged and electron transport dominates the intrinsic conductivity, it reduces to $N_D/n_i$; equal electron and hole mobilities instead give $N_D/(2n_i)$. Ionised-impurity scattering can change the doped mobility.