Trapping electrons

[madmike159]

I heard about a effect in semiconductors where you can trap a electron in a 2d plane. If you have a semiconductor inbetween a semiconductor of a higher band gap it creats a quantom well where the electron gets trapped. I guess because its not moving it has no defined position so it could exsist in the second dimension. Could some one please explain this in a bit more detail (if its even real).

Thanks:biggrin:

[f95toli]

This is know as a 2DEG (2D electron gas) and it is definitly real, there are plenty of devices that use 2DEGs in various ways.
Note that the electron is not really trapped in 2 spacetime dimensions, the "2" is due to the fact that it is confined to a layer which is much thinner than all relevant lengt-scales (e.g. its mean-free path) which means that all the relevant physics becomes two-dimensional (in very thin wires the physics becomes 1D and in small dots 0D).