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Photo-Electronic Properties

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Book cover Amorphous Chalcogenide Semiconductors and Related Materials

Abstract

Photo-excited electrons relax to ground states through several ways. One of the processes can be probed through photoluminescence, in which the most puzzling feature in amorphous chalcogenides may be the so-called half-gap rule of the peak energy. The origin will be discussed. Another photo-electronic property is the photoconduction. Most amorphous chalcogenides are good photoconductors, for which steady-state and transient characteristics are briefly discussed. Finally, we refer to a carrier avalanche effect in a-Se films, which has been applied to highly sensitive vidicons.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The authors are reluctant to use the word “exciton” in disordered systems (Kasap et al. 2006), since the exciton radius may be larger than the structural disorder in amorphous materials. The word “electron–hole pair” may cause less misunderstanding.

  2. 2.

    “Geminate recombination” means a recombination of a photoexcited electron–hole pair. It occurs when the thermalization process (with a distance of \(\sim{[D(\hbar \omega - {E_{\textrm{g}}})/{E_{{\textrm{vib}}}}]^{1/2}}\), where D is the diffusion coefficient of a mobile carrier), which dissipates the excess energy of \(\hbar \omega - {E_{\textrm{g}}}\), cannot overcome a Coulombic electron–hole attractive force.

  3. 3.

    Experimentally, it is more or less difficult to distinguish photo-currents and photo-thermal currents in small-gap semiconductors such as a-As2Te3 (Tanaka 2007). The ideal photocurrent flows under fixed temperatures, while light illumination necessarily rises sample temperature, which increases the electrical conductivity in proportion to exp(−E g/2k B T).

  4. 4.

    Note that in the simplest case, \({V_{\textrm{R}}} = eN{L^2}/(2{{{\upvarepsilon }}_{\textrm{R}}}{\varepsilon _0})\), where L is the sample thickness, ɛR the relative dielectric constant, and ε 0 the vacuum dielectric constant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Physics, Graduate School of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Kita-ku, Sapporo, 060-8628, Japan

    Keiji Tanaka

  2. Faculty of Engineering, Gifu University, Yanaido, Gifu, 501-1193, Japan

    Koichi Shimakawa

  3. Nagoya Industrial Science Institute, Nagoya, 460-0008, Japan

    Koichi Shimakawa

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  1. Keiji Tanaka
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  2. Koichi Shimakawa
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Correspondence to Keiji Tanaka .

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Tanaka, K., Shimakawa, K. (2011). Photo-Electronic Properties. In: Amorphous Chalcogenide Semiconductors and Related Materials. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9510-0_5

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