“…A number of experimental studies on the band gap nature of β-FeSi 2 have been performed by optical absorption measurements. From the analysis of the energy dependence of the absorption coefficient, in most reports it is argued that β-FeSi 2 has a direct band gap [1,2,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], but a few papers report an indirect gap lower than the direct one by some tens of meV. [13,14,15].…”