Past exam of the physics A course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / Paper 2 / Section C / C11 / Concentration for appreciable donor overlap

For donor number density $N_D$, the mean separation is of order $\ell \sim N_D^{-1/3}$. A donor-state overlap estimate sets this scale comparable with the effective radius:Relative to the atomic density, this is $3.77\times 10^{-5}$, about $38$ parts per million. If “start to overlap” is defined geometrically by centre separation $2a_B^{\ast }$, the estimate is instead $2.06\times 10^{23}{\mathrm{m}}^{-3}$, about $4.7$ parts per million. Thus the geometric estimate is of order $10^{23}$–$10^{24}{\mathrm{m}}^{-3}$. Real donor wavefunctions have tails, not hard orbit edges, so this does not define a sharp threshold or by itself locate a metal-insulator transition.