ZnSe homoepitaxial MSM photodetectors with transparent ITO contact electrodes

Abstract

We report the homoepitaxial growth of ZnSe layers on ZnSe substrates by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). It was found that we can only observe an extremely strong ZnSe (004) x-ray peak with a full-width-at-half-maximum of 21.5 arcsec, which is much smaller than that observed from ZnSe grown on GaAs substrates. Photoluminescence and Hall measurement also indicate that the quality of our homoepitaxial ZnSe layers is good. ZnSe-based homoepitaxial metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors with transparent indium-tin-oxide (ITO) contact electrodes were also fabricated. It was found that although ITO transparent contact electrodes can result in large photon absorption and large photocurrents, the low Schottky barrier height between ITO and homoepitaxial ZnSe would also result in relatively large dark currents. With an incident wavelength of 450 nm and a 1-V applied bias, it was found that the maximum responsivity is about 0.13 A/W, which corresponds to a quantum efficiency of 35%. Furthermore, it was found that the detector responsivity drops by more than two orders of magnitude across the cutoff region.