High-field spatial imaging of charge transport in silicon at low temperature

Abstract

We present direct imaging measurements of charge transport across a 1 cm × 1 cm × 4 mm-thick crystal of high purity silicon (∼15 kΩ-cm) at temperatures of 5 K and 500 mK. We use these data to measure lateral diffusion of electrons and holes as a function of the electric field applied along the [111] crystal axis and to verify our low-temperature Monte Carlo software. The range of field strengths in this paper exceed those used in our previous study [R. A. Moffatt et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 114, 032104 (2019)] by a factor of 10 and now encompass the region in which some recent silicon dark matter detectors operate [R. Agnese et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 051301 (2018)]. We also report on a phenomenon of surface charge trapping, which can reduce expected charge collection.