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In physics, an absorption edge (also known as an absorption discontinuity or absorption limit) is a sharp discontinuity in the absorption spectrum of a substance. These discontinuities occur at wavelengths where the energy of an absorbed photon corresponds to an electronic transition or ionization potential .
The Urbach Energy, or Urbach Edge, is a parameter typically denoted , with dimensions of energy, used to quantify energetic disorder in the band edges of a semiconductor. It is evaluated by fitting the absorption coefficient as a function of energy to an exponential function.
The optical band gap (see below) determines what portion of the solar spectrum a photovoltaic cell absorbs. [17] Strictly, a semiconductor will not absorb photons of energy less than the band gap; whereas most of the photons with energies exceeding the band gap will generate heat. Neither of them contribute to the efficiency of a solar cell.
The exact reverse of radiative recombination is light absorption. For the same reason as above, light with a photon energy close to the band gap can penetrate much farther before being absorbed in an indirect band gap material than a direct band gap one (at least insofar as the light absorption is due to exciting electrons across the band gap).
In 1953, the Austrian-American physicist Franz Urbach (1902–1969) [1] found that such tails decay exponentially into the gap. [2] Later, photoemission experiments delivered absorption models revealing temperature dependence of the tail. [3] A variety of amorphous crystalline solids expose exponential band edges via optical absorption.
The Moss-Burstein effect, also known as the Burstein–Moss shift, is the phenomenon in which the apparent band gap of a semiconductor is increased as the absorption edge is pushed to higher energies as a result of some states close to the conduction band being populated.
Energy band gaps can be classified using the wavevectors of the states surrounding the band gap: Direct band gap: the lowest-energy state above the band gap has the same k as the highest-energy state beneath the band gap. Indirect band gap: the closest states above and beneath the band gap do not have the same k value.
Typically, a Tauc plot shows the quantity hν (the photon energy) on the abscissa (x-coordinate) and the quantity (αhν) 1/2 on the ordinate (y-coordinate), where α is the absorption coefficient of the material. Thus, extrapolating this linear region to the abscissa yields the energy of the optical bandgap of the amorphous material.