Band gap energy determination by photoacoustic spectroscopy under continuous light excitation

In this work the authors used the photoacoustic spectroscopy under continuous light excitation to determine the optical band gap of semiconductors. The experiments were performed in lead iodide PbI2 and hexagonal silicon carbide 4H-SiC samples. The nonradiative relaxation processes are discussed in terms of the generated signal. A mechanism to describe the signal increase/decrease under the continuous excitation is presented. The results showed that the method was useful to locate the band gap directly from the optical absorption spectra. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.