A Tauc plot is used to determine the optical bandgap, or Tauc bandgap, of either disordered or amorphous semiconductors. In his original work Jan Tauc (/taʊts/) showed that the optical absorption spectrum of amorphous germanium resembles the spectrum of the indirect transitions in crystalline germanium (plus a tail due to localized states at lower energies), and proposed an extrapolation to find the optical bandgap of these crystalline-like states. Typically, a Tauc plot shows the quantity hν (the photon energy) on the abscissa and the quantity (αhν)1/2 on the ordinate, where α is the absorption coefficient of the material. Thus, extrapolating this linear region to the abscissa yields the energy of the optical bandgap of the amorphous material.