The measurement of minority carrier lifetimes is vital to determining the material quality and operational bandwidth of a broad range of optoelectronic devices. Typically, these measurements are made by recording the temporal decay of a carrier-concentration-dependent material property following pulsed optical excitation. Such approaches require some combination of efficient emission from the material under test, specialized collection optics, large sample areas, spatially uniform excitation, and/or the fabrication of ohmic contacts, depending on the technique used. In contrast, here we introduce a technique that provides electrical readout of minority carrier lifetimes using a passive microwave resonator circuit. We demonstrate >105 improvement in sensitivity, compared with traditional photoemission decay experiments and the ability to measure carrier dynamics in micron-scale volumes, much smaller than is possible with other techniques. The approach presented is applicable to a wide range of 2D, micro-, or nano-scaled materials, as well as weak emitters or non-radiative materials.
CITATION STYLE
Dev, S., Wang, Y., Kim, K., Zamiri, M., Kadlec, C., Goldflam, M., … Wasserman, D. (2019). Measurement of carrier lifetime in micron-scaled materials using resonant microwave circuits. Nature Communications, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09602-2
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