Document Type

Book Chapter

Date

2003

Keywords

amorphous silicon, solar cells

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

Crystalline semiconductors are very well known, including silicon (the basis of the integrated circuits used in modern electronics), Ge (the material of the first transistor), GaAs and the other III-V compounds (the basis for many light emitters), and CdS (often used as a light sensor). In crystals, the atoms are arranged in near-perfect, regular arrays or lattices. Of course, the lattice must be consistent with the underlying chemical bonding properties of the atoms. For example, a silicon atom forms four covalent bonds to neighboring atoms arranged symmetrically about it. This “tetrahedral” configuration is perfectly maintained in the “diamond” lattice of crystal silicon.

Source

harvested from author's c.v.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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