Auger recombination

In Auger recombination an electron-hole pair annihilates while transferring its energy to another electron or hole rather than to an emitted photon. The hot recipient subsequently loses energy, commonly to phonons. In a simple nondegenerate carrier-density model the rate is $R_A=C_n{n}^{2}p+C_{p}n{p}^2$, with electron and hole number densities $n,p$ and material-dependent coefficients. This makes the process especially important at high carrier injection. It is the reverse type of energy transfer to impact ionization, although detailed thresholds and matrix elements depend on the bands.