Abstract
The authors report the observation of an incoherent tunnelling phenomenon in Al/ZnS/p-Hg1-xCdxTe metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) capacitors in the temperature range 15<or=T<or=110 K. Under thermal equilibrium, both capacitance-voltage and conductance-voltage characteristics show strong oscillations when the MIS capacitor is biased into strong inversion. The data can be understood as being due to electron tunnelling between the three-dimensional (3D) valence band of p-type Hg1-xCdxTe and the 2D inversion layers at the interface of Hg1-xCdxTe and ZnS. This process, which is inevitably momentum-non-conserving in a non-degenerate semiconductor, is made possible via intermediate gap states. The temperature dependence of the oscillation amplitude can be well explained by the positive temperature coefficient of the band gap and the carrier freeze-out effect.
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