Hot Carrier Trapping Induced Negative Photoconductance in InAs Nanowires toward Novel Nonvolatile Memory

Abstract

We report a novel negative photoconductivity (NPC) mechanism in n-type indium arsenide nanowires (NWs). Photoexcitation significantly suppresses the conductivity with a gain up to 10^5. The origin of NPC is attributed to the depletion of conduction channels by light assisted hot electron trapping, supported by gate voltage threshold shift and wavelength dependent photoconductance measurements. Scanning photocurrent microscopy excludes the possibility that NPC originates from the NW/metal contacts and reveals a competing positive photoconductivity. The conductivity recovery after illumination substantially slows down at low temperature, indicating a thermally activated detrapping mechanism. At 78 K, the spontaneous recovery of the conductance is completely quenched, resulting in a reversible memory device which can be switched by light and gate voltage pulses. The novel NPC based optoelectronics may find exciting applications in photodetection and nonvolatile memory with low power consumption.

References in corpus (3)

• Single-Layer MoS2 Phototransistors
• Evidence of Majorana fermions in an Al - InAs nanowire topological superconductor
• Tunable Supercurrent Through Semiconductor Nanowires

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• Substrate Mediated Synthesis of Ti-Si-N Nano-and-Micro Structures for Optoelectronic Applications
• Zero bias conductance peak in InAs nanowire coupled to superconducting electrodes
• Record negative photoconductivity in N-polar AlGaN/GaN quantum-well heterostructures
• Non-local Chemical Potential Modulation in Topological Insulators Via Electric Field Driven Trapped Charge Migration
• Temperature-driven Emergence of Negative Photoconductivity in Semimetal MoTe2 Film Probed with Terahertz Spectroscopy
• Negative Photoconductance in van der Waals Heterostructures-Based Floating Gate Phototransistor