Snapshots of Band-Gap Jump (IMAGE)

University of California - Berkeley

Snapshots of Band-Gap Jump

Caption

By probing a silicon crystal with attosecond laser pulses, UC Berkeley scientists got a series of snapshots of the electron energies in the semiconductor. From back to front, the atom-bound electrons have a very narrow, sharply peaked range of energies (red), but once the electrons jump to the conduction band, the energy distribution spreads out (orange and yellow). The jump takes only 450 attoseconds.

Credit

Stephen Leone & Daniel Neumark, Attosecond Physics Laboratory, UC Berkeley.

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