Suppression of surface leakage in gate controlled type-II InAs/GaSb mid-infrared photodetectors

One of the biggest challenges of improving the electrical performance in Type II InAs/GaSb superlattice photodetector is suppressing the surface leakage. Surface leakage screens important bulk dark current mechanisms, and brings difficulty and uncertainty to the material optimization and bulk intrinsic parameters extraction such as carrier lifetime and mobility. Most of surface treatments were attempted beyond the mid-infrared (MWIR) regime because compared to the bulk performance, surface leakage in MWIR was generally considered to be a minor factor. In this work, we show that below 150K, surface leakage still strongly affects the electrical performance of the very high bulk performance p-π-M-n MWIR photon detectors. With gating technique, we can effectively eliminate the surface leakage in a controllable manner. At 110K, the dark current density of a 4.7 μm cut-off gated photon diode is more than 2 orders of magnitude lower than the current density in SiO ₂ passivated ungated diode. With a quantum efficiency of 48%, the specific detecivity of gated diodes attains 2.5 x 10 ¹⁴ cmHz ^1/2/W, which is 3.6 times higher than that of ungated diodes.