9.2.4 Indirect and Direct Band Gaps Silicon is the best-known semiconductor.

It is the standard for most electronic applications, for light detection at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, and for solar cells. However, silicon is a very poor light emitter because it can only make an indirect transition from the conduction band to the lower-energy valence band. This condition, called an indirect bandgap, means that an electron in the conduction band must interact with something else in order to drop down to the valence band. Normally, that interaction takes a while, so it is milliseconds before the silicon can emit light, and by then other interactions with much shorter lifetimes have drained away the energy that could have been emitted as light. Germanium and some other semiconductors such as gallium phosphide also have indirect bandgaps that make them poor light emitters. Silicon LEDs have been demonstrated in the laboratory, but they require special tricks to make the material behave differently. One example is fabricating nanostructures called quantum dots, which confine electrons and holes on the scale of a few nanometers. That quantum confinement changes the momentums of the electrons and holes to make it more likely that a conduction electron can drop directly into a hole in the valence band, making the silicon act more like a direct-bandgap material