Effect of dislocations on minority carrier lifetime in HgCdTe

This article shows that the temperature dependence of minority carrier lifetime in mercury cadmium telluride samples of differing dislocation densities can be accounted well by including the dislocation contribution in addition to the contribution of well known radiative, auger, and Shockley-Read recombination mechanisms. The dislocation contribution to the minority carrier lifetime has been calculated on the basis of a recently proposed model [V. Gopal and S. Gupta, IEEE-ED 50, 1220 (2003)] by treating dislocation as a discontinuity of the lattice. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.