Minority carrier lifetime of HgCdTe from photoconductivity decay method

The results of an analytical study of the photoconductivity decay (PCD) method for measuring carrier lifetimes of n-type HgCdTe show that the measurements give much higher values than the minority carrier lifetimes when trapping is significant. In contrast, for p-type HgCdTe, the PCD method gives results equal to or less than the minority carrier lifetime under the same trapping conditions. The difference in results between n-type and p-type HgCdTe is due to the different recombination properties of excess electrons when they are majority carriers or minority carriers, respectively.