Electronic and photoconductive properties of ultrathin InGaN photodetectors

Abstract

We report on the compositional dependencies of electron transport and photoconductive properties for ultrathin metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors based on In-rich InxGa1-xN alloys. For a In0.64Ga0.36N/GaN structure, the rise time close to the RC constant at low fields has been measured along with a transparency of similar to 77% and an absorbance of similar to 0.2 at a wavelength of 632 nm. The electron density profiles and low-field mobilities for different compositions of InGaN have been calculated by numerically solving the Schrodinger and Poisson equations and applying the ensemble Monte Carlo method, respectively. It was demonstrated that in ultrathin InxGa1-xN/GaN (0.5 < x < 1) heterostructures, in contrast to bulk InN exhibiting a strong surface electron accumulation, free electrons mostly tend to accumulate at the buried InGaN/GaN interface. We have also found that the low-field mobility in the InGaN/GaN heterostructures is strongly limited by the buried interface roughness which causes more than 95% of all scattering events occurred by two-dimensional electron transport under low electric field conditions.