Minority carrier lifetimes in different doped LWIR HgCdTe Grown by LPE

The carrier lifetimes of different types of p-type doped HgCdTe(x similar to 0.23) long wavelength infrared (LWIR) epilayers were measured which were Hg-vacancy, Au and arsenic doped ones prepared by Te-rich Liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE). By comparing the lifetimes of Hg-vacancy and extrinsic doped HgCdTe, we focus on three primary mechanisms limiting the lifetimes in these different p-type HgCdTe samples: radiative recombination, Auger recombination and Schokley-ReadHall (SRH) Recombination. The recombination mechanism in p-type HgCdTe is the SRH recombination at low temperatures and Auger and radiative recombination at high temperature. It is found that the lifetime of As-doped and Au-doped HgCdTe is far longer than that of Hg-vacancy-doped sample which is caused by the deep energy level of the Hg-vacancy acceptor that is considered as a recombination center in HgCdTe. Also we found lifetime in those p-type doped HgCdTe LWIR epilayers is limited by SRH by comparing the experimental lifetimes with the calculated data. Impurity doping was found to have a main effect on minority carrier lifetime.