An experimental demonstration of a dynamic decrease of the optical band gap of bulk n-InSb induced by picosecond, midinfrared laser pulses is reported. This occurs as a result of laser heating of the quiescent electron distribution by free-carrier absorption. The hot electrons vacate low-energy states near the conductionband minimum, unblocking terminal states for two-photon absorption across t...

Due to the compatibility with the well-developed Si-based semiconductor industry, there is considerable interest in developing silicon structures with direct energy band gaps for effective sunlight harvesting. In this paper, using silicon triangles as the building block, we propose a new silicon allotrope with a direct band gap of 0.61 eV, which is dynamically, thermally and mechanically stable...

It is challenging to epitaxially grow germanene on conventional semiconductor substrate. Based on first-principles calculations, we investigate the structural and electronic properties of germanene/germanane heterostructure (HTS). The results indicate that the Dirac cone with nearly linear band dispersion of germanene maintains in the band gap of substrate. Remarkably, the band gap opened in th...

We report on the nonequilibrium dynamics of the electronic structure of the layered semiconductor Ta_{2}NiSe_{5} investigated by time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. We show that below the critical excitation density of F_{C}=0.2  mJ cm^{-2}, the band gap narrows transiently, while it is enhanced above F_{C}. Hartree-Fock calculations reveal that this effect can be explained by ...

Doping of semiconductors by impurity atoms enabled their widespread technological application in microelectronics and optoelectronics. However, doping has proven elusive for strongly confined colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals because of the synthetic challenge of how to introduce single impurities, as well as a lack of fundamental understanding of this heavily doped limit under strong quantu...

There are two large groups of solid-state radiation detectors, which dominate the area of ionizing radiation measurements, scintillation detectors and semiconductor diodes. The scintillators detect high-energy radiation through generation of light which is subsequently registered by a photo-detector that converts light into an electrical signal. Semiconductor diodes employ reverse biased p-n ju...

Circuit breakers (CBs) are the main protection devices for both alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) power systems, ranging from tens of watts up to megawatts. This paper reviews the current status for solid-state circuit breakers (SSCBs) as well as hybrid circuit breakers (HCBs) with semiconductor power devices. A few novel SSCB and HCB concepts are described in this paper, includi...

The analogy between electromagnetic wave propagation in multidimensionally periodic structures and electronwave propagation in real crystals has proven to be a fruitful one. Initial efforts were motivated by the prospect of a photonic band gap, a frequency band in three-dimensional dielectric structures in which electromagnetic waves are forbidden irrespective of the propagation direction in sp...