A degenerate semiconductor is a semiconductor with such a high doping-level that the material starts to act more like a metal than as a semiconductor.
At moderate doping levels the dopant atoms create individual doping levels that can often be considered as localized states that can donate electrons or holes by thermal promotion (
or an optical transition)(
maybe silicon can do thiat?) to the conduction or valence bands respectively. At high enough impurity concentrations the individual impurity atoms may become close enough neighbors that their doping levels merge into an impurity band and the behavior of such a system ceases to show the typical traits of a semiconductor, e.g. its increase in conductivity with temperature. On the other hand a degenerate semiconductor still has far fewer charge carriers than a true metal so that its behavior is in many ways intermediary between semiconductor and metal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_semiconductori want to bring up somthin i was mentioning a while back.. stans brother stephen mentions that stainless goes through a cold rolled process and he said the result is little trianlgles of some sorts in the structure.. if you think about it a snowflakes shape is a hexagon.. hexagons can be made from triangles.. if you were to establish 3 lines around the water compound it would form a triangle..
and can the silicon create optical transistions in the stainless material... ? i read somewhere that stainless holds a lay of ozone over it as a skin thats the main reason it resists wheather corosion i think. but i think the silicon in the steel is what creates this effect and it is only active in presence of light? idk just a thought.
