Calculation of Minority Carriers’ Lifetime in HgCdTe Structures by Using the Method Based on Mutual Correlation Between the Concentration of Electrical Particles

Abstract

We perform a theoretical study of the bulk generation-recombination mechanisms, and the carrier lifetime in n- and p-type long- and mid-wavelength infrared HgCdTe structures at liquid nitrogen (LN) temperature has been done. This article is a continuation of our previous work and presents a method for calculating the excess minority carrier lifetime considering the mutual correlation between the concentration of electrons, holes, ionized impurities, and trap states resulting from the principle of charge conservation. It has been shown that recombination involving shallow impurity states in HgCdTe structures with low intrinsic concentration has a significant impact on minority carriers’ lifetime. This applies to both p- and n-type materials. The results of calculations of the carrier lifetime determined by the interband processes: radiative, Auger 1 and 7, recombination involving impurities, as well as and Shockley–Read–Hall (SRH) mechanisms related to mercury vacancies have been compared with experimental data presented by other authors. By analyzing the published calculations made by American researchers, the values of the overlap integrals <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\vert {F}_{1}{F}_{2} \vert $ </tex-math></inline-formula> for Auger processes were determined, which allowed to obtain a good compliance of our calculations with the experimental values. In this article, the cross sections for SRH recombination with the participation of mercury vacancies were estimated. These values are lower than those previously presented by other researchers. By verifying the results of the calculations with the experimental data, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.