Valence band engineering of GaAsBi for low noise avalanche photodiodes

Abstract

Avalanche Photodiodes (APDs) are key semiconductor components that amplify weak optical signals via the impact ionization process, but this process’ stochastic nature introduces ‘excess’ noise, limiting the useful signal to noise ratio (or sensitivity) that is practically achievable. The APD material’s electron and hole ionization coefficients (α and β respectively) are critical parameters in this regard, with very disparate values of α and β necessary to minimize this excess noise. Here, the analysis of thirteen complementary p-i-n/n-i-p diodes shows that alloying GaAs with ≤ 5.1 % Bi dramatically reduces β while leaving α virtually unchanged—enabling a 2 to 100-fold enhancement of the GaAs α/β ratio while extending the wavelength beyond 1.1 µm. Such a dramatic change in only β is unseen in any other dilute alloy and is attributed to the Bi-induced increase of the spin-orbit splitting energy (∆so). Valence band engineering in this way offers an attractive route to enable low noise semiconductor APDs to be developed.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Liu, Y. Yi, X. Bailey, N.J. Zhou, Z. Rockett, T.B.O. Lim, L.W. Tan, C.H. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-9452 Richards, R.D. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7043-8372 David, J.P.R. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1105-208X
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: 6 August 2021 Published (online): 6 August 2021 Accepted: 1 July 2021
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (Sheffield)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number Engineering and Physical Science Research Council EP/N020715/1; EP/M506618/1
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	14 Sep 2021 08:46
Last Modified:	16 Sep 2021 05:09
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-021-24966-0
Related URLs:	Author
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:178144

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Valence band engineering of GaAsBi for low noise avalanche photodiodes

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