Abstract
We fabricated a novel photodetector by subjecting a Si crystal having a p–n homojunction to phonon-assisted annealing. The photosensitivity of this device for incident light having a wavelength of 1.16 μm or greater was about three times higher than that of a reference Si-PIN photodiode. The photosensitivity was increased for incident light with a wavelength of 1.32 μm by applying a forward current. When the forward current density was 9 A/cm2, a photosensitivity of 0.10 A/W was achieved. This value is at least 4000 times higher than the zero-bias photosensitivity. This remarkable increase was due to the manifestation of optical amplification cause by the forward current injection. For a forward current density of 9 A/cm2, the small-signal gain coefficient of the optical amplification was 2.2×10−2, and the saturation power was 7.1×102 mW.
Highlights
Silicon (Si) is an abundant material in the Earth’s crust and has low toxicity, and it is widely used as a material for many electronic and optical devices
If the photosensitivity limit of Si photodetectors (Si-PDs) could be extended past the 1.11 μm wavelength into the near-infrared region at 1.3 μm and above, these problems could be overcome
The operating principle of the Si-PD is described in Sect. 2, the fabrication method is described in Sect. 3, device characterization and evaluation results are presented in Sect. 4, and the paper concludes with Sect. 5
Summary
Silicon (Si) is an abundant material in the Earth’s crust and has low toxicity, and it is widely used as a material for many electronic and optical devices. An additional benefit of Si-PDs is their high compatibility with electronic devices For this reason, photoelectric conversion devices exploiting effects such as mid-bandgap absorption [5,6,7], surface-state absorption [8, 9], internal photoemission absorption [10, 11], and twophoton absorption [12, 13] in Si have been reported in the literature. The photocurrent of the novel Si-PD fabricated by this method was varied by a stimulated emission process driven by the incident light. Because this stimulated emission process caused optical amplification, the photosensitivity of this Si-PD was remarkably increased. The operating principle of the Si-PD is described in Sect. 2, the fabrication method is described in Sect. 3, device characterization and evaluation results are presented in Sect. 4, and the paper concludes with Sect. 5
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