Thank you for the response. As a follow up question: The band gap energy is a well defined concept, but is there a name for the upper limit on energy that the semiconductor can absorb because of the mechanism I just said?
Alright, but let me take a simple example like a semiconductor with a direct band gap, like GaAs. It starts absorbing light when the incident photo energy is ~1.4eV, and it can absorb higher energies than that as well. Why does it stop absorbing higher energy photons at some point? Is it...
I naively thought that most materials were transparent to radiation of frequencies above their plasma frequency, and opaque to radiation below it. The most intuitive (and analyzed lightly in Griffiths' E&M book) reason I've heard is that opaqueness is caused by electrons in the material...
Hi, someone was telling me that if you have two metals in close contact (like, one sputtered onto the other or something) with each other, if they have different work functions, you'll get some sort of diode effect (even without either of them being doped) if you have a current running from one...
So during neutron scattering in a crystal, a neutron can interact with 0, 1, or more phonons. First of all, what is the actual mechanism by which they interact? My textbook just kind of glosses over that.
Second of all, when a neutron goes in it can absorb a phonon and come out with more...