Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mphil-in-micro-and-nanotechnology-enterprise-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2021/paper-1/12/ii/solution

The illuminated area and incident power are
A photon has energy , above the silicon band gap. With one collected electron per photon,
Use the ideal-diode approximation with ideality factor , negligible shunt leakage and the same dark diode parameters under illumination. At , . The measured dark point then fixes
At open circuit the forward diode electric current balances the photocurrent:
This is below the band gap expressed per elementary charge. Excess photon energy does not translate directly into terminal voltage; much of it thermalizes.
The paper does not explicitly specify an ideality factor. If it is not taken as unity, one dark operating point cannot determine both and . The corresponding family is
Thus is a stated-model estimate, not a parameter-free inference from that one measurement.

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