In the past 50 years, the high gain in quantum efficiency of photoconductors is often explained by a widely accepted theory in which the photogain is proportional to the minority carrier lifetime and inversely proportional to the carrier transit time across the photoconductor. It occasionally misleads scientists to believe that a high-speed and high-gain photodetector can be made simply by shortening the device length.The theory is derived on the assumption that the distribution of photogenerated excess carriers is spatially uniform. In this Letter, we find that this assumption is not valid for a photoconductive semiconductor due to the metal-semiconductor boundary at the two metal electrodes inducing carrier confinement. By solving the continuity equation and performing numerical simulations, we conclude that a photoconductor intrinsically has no gain or at least no high gain, no matter how short the transit time and how long the minority lifetime is. The high gain observed in experiments comes from other extrinsic effects such as defects, surface states and surface depletion regions that localize excess minority carriers, leaving a large number of excess majority carriers accumulated in the conduction channel for the photogain. Following the Ohm's Law, a universal equation governing the photogain in a photoconductor is established at the end of this Letter.

It is known that self-assembled molecular monolayer doping technique has the advantages of forming ultra-shallow junctions and introducing minimal defects in semiconductors. In this paper, we report however the formation of carbon-related defects in the molecular monolayer-doped silicon as detected by deep-level transient spectroscopy and low-temperature Hall measurements. The molecular monolayer doping process is performed by modifying silicon substrate with phosphorus-containing molecules and annealing at high temperature. The subsequent rapid thermal annealing drives phosphorus dopants along with carbon contaminants into the silicon substrate, resulting in a dramatic decrease of sheet resistance for the intrinsic silicon substrate. Low-temperature Hall measurements and secondary ion mass spectrometry indicate that phosphorus is the only electrically active dopant after the molecular monolayer doping. However, during this process, at least 20% of the phosphorus dopants are electrically deactivated. The deep-level transient spectroscopy shows that carbon-related defects are responsible for such deactivation.

No abstract

Photoconductors based on semiconducting thin films, nanowires and 2-dimensional (2D) atomic layers have been extensively investigated in the past decades. But there is no explicit photogain equation that allows for fitting and designing photoresponses of these devices. In this work, we managed to derive explicit photogain equations for silicon nanowire photoconductors based on experimental observations. These equations may be

Photoconductors have extraordinarily high gain in quantum efficiency, but the origin of the gain has remained in dispute for decades. In this work, we employ photo Hall effect to reveal the gain mechanisms by probing the dynamics of photogenerated charge carriers in silicon nanowire photoconductors. The results reveal that a large number of photogenerated minority electrons are localized in the surface depletion region and surface trap states. The same number of excess hole counterparts is left in the nanowire conduction channel, resulting in the fact that excess holes outnumber the excess electrons in the nanowire conduction channel by orders of magnitude. The accumulation of the excess holes broadens the conduction channel by narrowing down the depletion region, which leads to the experimentally observed high photo gain.