Abstract
A linearized version of a recently developed theory of phonon amplification by hot electrons in high‐mobility semiconductors is used to estimate mutual electron–phonon drag and heating effects in materials of lower mobility with dominant acoustic deformation potential and ionized impurity scattering. Accordingly a weakly drifting heated Maxwell distribution is assumed for carriers with quadratic and isotropic energy dispersion. Simple closed expressions are found for the steady‐state mobility, showing explicitly how mutual drag effects (increasing the mobility) dominate at lower electric fields, whereas the effects of phonon heating (lowering the mobility) dominate at fields for which the electron temperature is more than twice the lattice temperature. The results are applied to n‐germanium.