Back Halfmetaal Afrikaans Semi metalls Catalan Semimétal French Félfém (szilárdtestfizika) Hungarian Semimetallo (fisica) Italian 半金属 (バンド理論) Japanese 반금속 Korean അർദ്ധലോഹങ്ങൾ Malayalam Halfmetaal Dutch Полуметалл (физика твёрдого тела) Russian

Semimetal

Not to be confused with Half-metal.
Filling of the electronic states in various types of materials at equilibrium. Here, height is energy while width is the density of available states for a certain energy in the material listed. The shade follows the Fermi–Dirac distribution (black: all states filled, white: no state filled). In metals and semimetals the Fermi level EF lies inside at least one band.
In insulators and semiconductors the Fermi level is inside a band gap; however, in semiconductors the bands are near enough to the Fermi level to be thermally populated with electrons or holes. "intrin." indicates intrinsic semiconductors.
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A semimetal is a material with a small energy overlap between the bottom of the conduction band and the top of the valence band, but they do not overlap in momentum space. According to electronic band theory, solids can be classified as insulators, semiconductors, semimetals, or metals. In insulators and semiconductors the filled valence band is separated from an empty conduction band by a band gap. For insulators, the magnitude of the band gap is larger (e.g., > 4 eV) than that of a semiconductor (e.g., < 4 eV). Because of the slight overlap between the conduction and valence bands, semimetals have no band gap and a small density of states at the Fermi level. A metal, by contrast, has an appreciable density of states at the Fermi level because the conduction band is partially filled.[1]

  1. ^ Burns, Gerald (1985). Solid State Physics. Academic Press, Inc. pp. 339–40. ISBN 978-0-12-146070-9.

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