Complex Bifurcation Phenomena in a Tunnel Diode Model

Tunnel Diodes are semiconductor devices that have many uses in physics and other fields. In this thesis, we study the effect of negative differential conductance in the current-voltage(IV) characteristic region of the tunnel diode and study the resulting bifurcation phenomenon. We first study the 3D model that has been physically studied by Steven Jones. We are able to successfully construct the circuit model with nonlinear equations, characterize the bifurcation phenomena by constructing a phase diagram of the system and discovering evidence of the codimension 2 bifurcation phenomenon. We then proceed to simplify the system by replacing the complicated form of the I-V characteristic with a cubic form. Non-dimensionalization of the