Photoelectric Emission from the Valence Band in AgBr

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

New data on the spectral dependence of the photoelectric yield from AgBr corroborate the threshold energy near 6 ev found in early work by Fleischmann. At higher energies, the yield rises in a reasonable way to plateau values above 10^-2 electron/incident photon. The emission is accordingly interpreted as originating in the valence band. Since the electron affinity of the crystal is then 3.5 ev and the band gap a comparable 2.5 ev, AgBr is an interesting type of photoemitter in which scattering of excited electrons by valence-band electrons (as in avalanche processes) is incipient near the threshold energy. AgBr is compared to extreme examples of strong and weak valence-band scattering.