Ultrasensitive and High-Speed Ga₂O₃ Solar-Blind Photodetection Based on Defect Engineering

Abstract

Oxygen vacancy (VO) defects are ubiquitous in oxide semiconductors and usually served as charge carriers recombination centers to depress the device performance. Herein, a surface VO defect compensation engineering is conducted to modulate the VO and improve the device performance of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\beta $ </tex-math></inline-formula> -Ga <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> O <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> film via oxygen-plasma treatment. As a result, the photodetectors (PD) based on 30 min oxygen-plasma treated Gallium oxide (Ga <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> O <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> ) film not only exhibit record-low dark current of 5 fA, over three orders of magnitude times higher responsivity rejection ratio ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}_{{250}}/{R}_{{400}}{)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , and faster rise and decay speed than the untreated device but also the oxygen-plasma-treated PDs exhibits exceptional sensitivity to detect extremely weak UV signals ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.1 \mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> /cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{{2}}{)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with a photo-to-dark current ratio of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 10^{{4}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Also, it is discovered that the device based on oxygen plasma has excellent photoelectric stabilities. The defect engineering with surface plasma treatment offers an efficient strategy for the high performance of Ga <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> O <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> film devices.