A wide ultraviolet spectra response photodetector based on epitaxial growth of highly-oriented ε-Ga2O3 crystal on diamond substrate

In recent years, diamond has shown great potential in solar-blind ultraviolet (UV) photodetection due to its ultrawide bandgap (∼ 5.5 eV) and other superior semiconductor properties. However, the response region of diamond photodetector is usually smaller than 230 nm, which cannot cover the whole solar-blind region from 200 to 280 nm. In this work, an ε-Ga2O3/diamond photodetector with wide spectra responsivity from 210 (or even lower) to 260 nm was fabricated. High-quality ε-Ga2O3 film with columnar crystal was epitaxially grown on single crystalline CVD diamond substrate by pulse laser deposition (PLD). TEM characterization revealed that the ε-Ga2O3 film grew along the <001> orientation on diamond (100) substrate. The deep ultraviolet (DUV) photodetector based on the ε-Ga2O3/diamond structure showed a high light-to-dark ratio over 5.7 × 104 and good linear response to the incident light power density from 10 to 400 mW/cm2. Moreover, compared to other photodetectors, the fabricated ε-Ga2O3/diamond photodetector achieved high responsivity and wide spectra response region from 210 to 260 nm, with high solar-blind rejection ratio of 104 (R240/R280) and 165 (R210/R280), respectively. The extension of spectra region with high responsivity of the ε-Ga2O3/diamond photodetector can be attributed to the thin thickness of ε-Ga2O3 film (around 200 nm) and parts of the DUV light were absorbed by diamond. The high responsivity and wide spectra response region indicate the fabricated ε-Ga2O3/diamond photodetector can be used for the detection of ultraviolet in the most of the DUV region.