Photon recycling effect in small pixel p-i-n HgCdTe long wavelength infrared photodiodes

Abstract The growing demand for high operating temperature infrared detectors and the reduction in pixel size is one of the key drivers for material and technology improvements in recent years. It has been predicted that a long Shockley-Read-Hall lifetime in HgCdTe mandates the use of this material for room-temperature operation. A fully-depleted reverse-biased long wavelength infrared P-on-n HgCdTe heterojunction photodiode fulfils HOT requirements. In such conditions, Auger recombination is eliminated and due to low generation current, the detector performance can be limited by the background. Influence of radiative recombination is treated in different way in these considerations. In the paper it is shown that photon recycling effect limits the influence of radiative recombination on the performance of the small pixel HgCdTe photodiodes in wide temperature range between 80 and 230 K.