What is Optical and Thermal Excitation in Semiconductors – Definition

Optical and Thermal Excitation in Semiconductors. Thermal excitation does not require any other form of starting impulse. This phenomenon occurs also at room temperature. Periodic Table

Valence Band - Conduction Band - Band GapIn general, semiconductors are materials, inorganic or organic, which have the ability to control their conduction depending on chemical structure, temperature, illumination, and presence of dopants. The name semiconductor comes from the fact that these materials  have an electrical conductivity between that of a metal, like copper, gold, etc. and an insulator, such as glass. They have an energy gap less than 4eV (about 1eV). In solid-state physics, this energy gap or band gap is an energy range between valence band and conduction band where electron states are forbidden. In contrast to conductors, electrons in a semiconductor must obtain energy (e.g. from ionizing radiation) to cross the band gap and to reach the conduction band.

Optical and Thermal Excitation in Semiconductors

Energy for the excitation can be obtained by different ways.

Thermal Excitation

Electron-hole pairs are constantly generated from thermal energy as well, in the absence of any external energy source. Thermal excitation does not require any other form of starting impulse. This phenomenon occurs also at room temperature. It is caused by impurities, irregularity in structure lattice or by dopant. It strongly depends on the Egap (a distance between valence and conduction band), so that for lower Egap a number of thermally excited charge carriers increases. Since thermal excitation results in the detector noise, active cooling is required for some types of semiconductors (e.g. germanium). Detectors based on silicon have sufficiently low noise even by room temperature. This is caused by the large band gap of silicon (Egap= 1.12 eV), which allows us to operate the detector at room temperature, but cooling is prefered to reduce noise.

Optical Excitation

Note that, energy of a single photon of visible light spectrum is comparable with these band gaps. Photons of wave lengths 700 nm – 400 nm have energies of  1.77 eV 3.10 eV. As a result, also visible light is able to excite electrons to the conduction band. Actually, this is the principle of photovoltaic panels that generate electric current.

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See also:

Properties of Semiconductors

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