| Abstract | As mentioned in the Preface of these Proceedings, one important aspect of the Workshop was to review recent advances in the field of inelastic fight scattering from elementary excitations in semiconductors. To that end, the workshop organizers requested an introductory lecture from A. Pinczuk that would cover developments in what could be called the artificially structured materials era, which has occupied the last decade or so. But rather than just review recent work for this introductory chapter, the organizers felt a more comprehensive history of research developments would be appropriate, particularly as this had not been attempted before. E. Burstein’s lecture on early developments in light scattering spectroscopy of semiconductors, together with M. Cardona’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the field, naturally lead to their co-option in such a task. What follows is a general account of key and other important developments in the subject to date, biased to some extent by the knowledge and preferences of the contributors. We apologize in advance for any inadvertent omission of other major relevant research work. |
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