Solid State Beginners' Solid State & Electronics Textbooks

[Sam I Am]

I have found a couple other threads like this but I am looking for something at a very beginning level. I joined an experimental condensed matter group for the summer at the school where I will be matriculating as a first-year graduate student in the fall. They study various electrical/mechanical properties of graphene which is endlessly fascinating to me and I enjoy the work that I will be doing, but I am so far behind in terms of knowledge that I need desperately to catch up.

Not only have I no experience in condensed matter, but none in experimental physics either. My undergraduate department did not have any labs, nor any faculty doing research in condensed matter/solid state, or anything experimental.

The experimental know-how is something I will pick up as time progresses, but the lack of knowledge about electronics/solid state is something that I can work on. My background knowledge is one semester of quantum mechanics, one semester of classical mechanics, and two semesters of E&M.

For example, some things that I would like to be covered:

• band gaps (indirect vs. direct)
• doping, semiconductors
• lattice arrangements (grain size, etc.)

Any suggestions? Thanks a bunch!

(edit: thanks for moving the thread)

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

Aschroft and Mermin and Kittel's are the standard textbooks on solid state physics, there's another book with solved exercises in Solid state physics which you can check in amazon (I don't remember its name by heart).

If you look at more EE books on Electronic Devices then there's the book by Robert Pierre, called Fundementals of Semiconductors.