Heterodimensional schottky contacts to modulation-doped heterojunction with application to photodetection

The growing technological demand for high speed and compact integrated electronics and Optics is a pressing challenge. Speed and compactness necessitate low power consumption semiconductors with high transport mobility carriers, with potential of ultra large-scale integration of electronic and Optoelectronics circuitry. One avenue to fulfill these requirements is to utilize reduced dimensionality where carriers are spatially confined to less than three-dimensions, causing their energy levels to become quantized and their transport favorably affected. With recent progress in semiconductor growth and processing technologies low dimensionality has become practically realizable, this makes the study of contact properties to these systems increasingly important. In this work we study the contact between a low-dimensional semiconductor structure and a three-dimensional metal and the application of such a contact in photodetection. We theoretically derive the thermionic emission current for Schottky contact to two-dimensional and one-dimensional structures. The derivation underscores the discrete nature of low-dimensional structures and shows that the thermionic emission current is reduced by a factor exponentially proportional to the first quantized energy level. We also propose and formulate, for the first time, a physical phenomenon in two-dimensional structures created by modulation doping of a heterojunction, which is the effect of the cloud of electrons in the small bandgap material on the thermionic emission current. We have named this the electron-electron cloud effect; we show that this interaction increases the effective Schottky barrier height in a fashion counter to the image force lowering mechanism. In order to realize Schottky contact to low-dimensional structures, we have fabricated a novel Heterojunction Metal-Semiconductor-Metal (HMSM) photodetector. Experimental characterization and the general trends of the behavior of the HMSM devices are presented within the body of this thesis. We conclude by demonstrating other applications of such heterostructure, in particular, we present an optically and electrically gateable variable reactance device. Before we delve into introducing this study, we forward by an overview attempting to explore where such a study and similar like us as infinitesimal as it is might seem ties in the global picture of the propitious technological growth and how this technological development touches every humans kind life.