Determination of the carrier concentration in CdSe crystals from the effective infrared absorption coefficient measured by means of the photothermal infrared radiometry

Abstract

In this paper, a non-contact method that allows to determine the carrier concentration in CdSe crystals is presented. The method relies on the measurement of the effective infrared absorption coefficient by means of the photothermal infrared radiometry (PTR). In order to obtain the effective infrared absorption coefficient and thermal diffusivity, the frequency characteristics of the PTR signal were analyzed in the frame of a one-dimensional heat transport model for infrared semitransparent crystals. The carrier concentrations were estimated using a theory introduced by Ruda and a recently proposed normalization procedure for the PTR signal. The deduced carrier concentrations of the investigated CdSe crystals are in reasonable agreement with those obtained using Hall measurements and infrared spectroscopy. The method presented in this paper can also be applied to other semiconductors with the carrier concentration in the range of 1014–1017 cm−3.