High Purity Liquid Phase Epitaxial GaAs For Radiation Detectors

We report on the growth of high purity n-GaAs using Liquid Phase Epitaxy (LPE) and the fabrication of room temperature p-i-n radiation detectors. Our epilayers are grown from a Ga solvent in a graphite boat in a pure hydrogen atmosphere. Growth is started at a temperature of approximately 800 °C. Our best epilayers show a net-residual-donor concentration of 2×1013 cm−3, confirmed by Hall effect measurements. The residual donors have been analyzed by far infrared spectroscopy and found to be sulfur and silicon. Epilayers with thicknesses of up to 120 µm have been deposited on 650 µm thick semi-insulating GaAs substrates and on 500 µm thick n+-type GaAs substrates. We report the results obtained with Schottky barrier diodes fabricated from these high purity n-type GaAs epilayers and operated as X-ray detectors. The Schottky barrier contacts consisted of evaporated circular gold contacts on epilayers on n+ substrates. The ohmic contacts were formed by evaporated and alloyed Ni-Ge-Au films on the back of the substrate. Several of our diodes exhibit currents of the order of 1 to 10 nA at reverse biases depleting approximately 50 µm of the epilayer. This very encouraging result, demonstrating the possibility for fabricating GaAs p-i-n diodes with depletion layers in high purity GaAs instead of semi-insulating GaAs, is supported by similar results obtained by several other groups. The consequences of using high purity instead of semi-insulating GaAs will be much reduced charge carrier trapping. Diode electrical characteristics and detector performance results using 55Fe and 241Am radiation will be discussed.