Monolayer of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), commonly known as "white graphene" is a promising wide bandgap semiconducting material for deep-ultaviolet optoelectronic devices. In this report, the light absorption of a single layer hexagonal boron nitride is calculated using a tight-binding Hamiltonian. The absorption is found to be monotonically decreasing function of photon energy compared to graphene where absorption coefficient is independent of photon energy and characterized by the effective fine-structure constant.
@article{arxiv.1109.5145,
title = {Interband absorption in single layer hexagonal boron nitride},
author = {Aniruddha Konar and Raj Jana and Tian Fang and Guowang Li and William O'Brien and Debdeep Jena},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.5145},
year = {2011}
}