Room-temperature oxygen sensitization in highly textured, nanocrystalline PbTe films: A mechanistic study

In this paper, we report large mid-wave infrared photoconductivity in highly textured, nanocrystalline PbTe films thermally evaporated on Si at room temperature. Responsivity as high as 25 V/W is measured at the 3.5 μm wavelength. The large photoconductivity is attributed to the oxygen incorporation in the films by diffusion. Carrier concentration as low as 1017 cm−3 is identified to be the consequence of Fermi level pinning induced by the diffused oxygen. The successful demonstration of IR-sensitive PbTe films without the need for high-temperature processing presents an important step toward monolithic integration of mid-wave PbTe infrared detectors on Si read-out integrated circuits (ROICs).