Direct growth of graphene on hyper-doped silicon to enhance carrier transport for infrared photodetection

Abstract The importance of infrared photodetectors cannot be overstated, especially in fields such as security, communication, and military. While silicon-based infrared photodetectors are widely used due to the maturity of the semiconductor industry, their band gap of 1.12 eV limits their infrared light absorption above 1100 nm, making them less effective. To overcome this limitation, we report a novel infrared photodetector prepared by growing graphene on the surface of zinc hyper-doped silicon. This technique utilizes hyper-doping to introduce deep level assisted infrared light absorption benefit from the enhanced carrier collection capacity of graphene. Without introducing new energy consumption, the hyper-doped substrate annealing treatment is completed during the growth of graphene. By the improvement of transport and collection of charge carriers, the graphene growth adjusts the band structure to upgrade electrode contact, resulting in a response of 1.6 mA W−1 under laser irradiation with a wavelength of 1550 nm and a power of 2 mW. In comparison, the response of the photodetector without graphene was only 0.51 mA W−1, indicating a three-fold performance improvement. Additionally, the device has lower dark current and lower noise current, resulting in a noise equivalent power of 7.6 × 10–8 W Hz−0.5. Thus, the combination of transition metal hyper-doping and graphene growth technology has enormous potential for developing the next generation of infrared photodetectors.