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Article: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Technology Spotlight).
- Article from:
- Designfax
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Nelson Publishing. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight--from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet--to electrical current. The band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead a much lower 0.7 eV "We were studying the properties of indium nitride as a component of LEDs," says MSD's Wladek Walukiewicz, who led the collaborators ...