Abstract
The pinch effect in semiconductors is considered for the case when excess current carriers are injected from contacts into a semiconductor. A crystal with dimensions long compared to the bipolar diffusion length, permits to use the field‐driven current approximation [1, 2]; in most of the volume of the solid the longitudinal field flows of carriers dominate over the longitudinal diffusion flows and the volume of the solid absorbs most of the applied voltage and hence determines the current‐voltage characteristic. The treatment is limited to the high injection level situation, when a local density of non‐equilibrium carriers significantly exceeds that of equilibrium electrons and holes. The carriers are supposed to be non‐degenerate. For crystals of plate and cylinder geometry the current‐voltage characteristics, the electric field, and the carrier density distribution are calculated. The calculations are performed for two aspects of space recombination kinetics — the monomolecular and the bimolecular recombination. It is shown that the bimolecular recombination reduces the current at pinch conditions.