Measurements of the grain boundary conduction in Ge-bicrystals grown from material of widely different impurity ranges show sheet resistivities of .003 to .01 ohm-cm for an assumed grain boundary layer width of 100 A. This value is practically constant throughout a temperature range from 2 °K to 300°K if leakage currents through the bulk are kept small by the use of junction contacts. This and the linear I—V characteristic suggest that the conductivity mechanism is dominated by the free orbitals and their overlapping wave functions in the internal surface layer.
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