Can you spot a speck of space dust?: NASA's Stardust spacecraft has been collecting cosmic dust: Aerogel tiles and aluminum foil sat for nearly 200 days in the interstellar dust stream before returning to Earth. Citizen scientists identified most of the 71 tracks where particles were caught in the aerogel, and scanning electron microscopy revealed 25 craterlike features where particles punched through the foil. By performing trajectory and composition analysis, Westphal et al. report that seven of the particles may have an interstellar origin. These dust particles have surprisingly diverse mineral content and structure as compared with models of interstellar dust based on previous astronomical observations. Science , this issue p. 786

This letter reports on the pressure dependence of the optical absorption edge of ZnO in the rock-salt phase, up to 20 GPa. Both vapor-phase monocrystals and pulsed-laser-deposition thin films on mica have been investigated. Rock-salt ZnO is shown to be an indirect semiconductor with a band gap of 2.45±0.15 eV, whose pressure coefficient is very small. At higher photon energies, a direct transition is observed (4.6 eV at 10 GPa), with a positive pressure coefficient (around 40±3 meV/GPa between 5 and 19 GPa). These results are interpreted on the basis of first-principles electronic band structure calculations.

Chemical effects on the conduction-band filling and band-gap renormalization in ZnO thin films doped with group-III elements (Al, Ga, and In) are investigated by means of optical and photoemission experiments and first-principles density-functional calculations. The Fermi-level position, as obtained from ultraviolet photoemission measurements, exhibits a relatively small and positive shift (about 0.4 eV) with respect to the valence band for increasing electron concentrations up to ${10}^{21}{\text{cm}}^{-3}$. The optical gap exhibits a much larger increase for the same concentration range and the total shift appears to be smaller for In-doped ZnO. Absorption measurements under pressure show that the pressure coefficient of the optical gap is correlated with the electron concentration in films, decreasing with increasing electron concentration. As a consequence, the contributions of band filling and band-gap renormalization to the optical-gap shift can be separated on the basis of the different pressure behavior of the physical parameters involved in each effect. Standard models on band-gap narrowing fail to give account of these results. Supercell density-functional calculations show that the conduction band of heavily doped ZnO is modified by the presence of group-III doping elements, which give rise to small gaps in specific points of the Brillouin zone, modifying the conduction band dispersion in the way predicted, in a much simpler approach, by the band-anticrossing model.