For the fabrication of a virtual substrate with SiGe selleck products buffer layers, a method using a reverse Selleckchem 4EGI-1 grading by a two-step growth procedure was employed [16]. The fully relaxed Si 0.6Ge 0.4 VS was grown at 550°C on a Si 0.5Ge 0.5 layer which is only partially relaxed. The Si 0.5Ge 0.5 seed layer was deposited at low temperature of 350°C; its thickness t was such so as to keep a residual compressive strain and chosen to have a negligible lattice mismatch with the

final Si 0.6Ge 0.4 VS. In our structure, t was adjusted to be 300 nm as determined from separate Raman measurements. Figure 1 Device structure of the QDIP on SiGe virtual substrate (VS). The structure is that of a quantum dot infrared detector with ten layers of Ge QDs in a SiGe matrix.

The active region of the device was composed of ten stacks of Ge quantum dots separated by 35-nm Si 0.6Ge 0.4 barriers grown on top of the virtual substrate. Each Ge QD layer consisted of a nominal Ge thickness of about 0.55 nm and formed by self-assembling in the Stranski-Krastanov growth mode at 500°C and at a growth rate of 0.02 nm/s. From scanning tunneling microscopy experiments with uncapped samples, we observed the Ge dots to be approximately 10 to 15 nm in lateral size and about 1.0 to 1.5 nm in height. The density of the dots is about 3 to 4 × 1011 cm −2. The active region was sandwiched in between the 200-nm-thick intrinsic Si 0.6Ge 0.4 buffer and cap layers grown at 550°C. Finally, a 200-nm-thick p +-Si 0.6Ge 0.4 top contact layer (3×1018 cm −3) was deposited. The p-type remote doping of the selleckchem dots was achieved with a boron δ-doping layer inserted 5 nm above each dot layer, providing after spatial transfer approximately three holes per dot. For vertical photocurrent (PC) measurements, the sample was processed into 700×700 μm2 mesas by optical

photolithography and contacted by Al/Si metallization. The bottom contact is defined as the ground when applying voltage to the detector. The normal incidence photoresponse was obtained using a Bruker Vertex 70 Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer (Ettlingen, Germany) with a spectral Methisazone resolution of 5 cm −1 along with a SR570 low-noise current preamplifier (Stanford Research Systems, Sunnyvale, CA, USA). The PC spectra were calibrated with a DLaTGS detector (SELEX Galileo Inc., Arlington, VA, USA). The dark current was measured as a function of bias U b by a Keithley 6430 Sub-Femtoamp Remote SourceMeter (Cleveland, OH, USA). The devices were mounted in a cold finger inside a Specac cryostat (Orpington, Kent, UK) with ZnSe windows. Results and discussion The detector dark current as a function of bias voltage, presented in Figure 2, was measured with a cold shield to eliminate background radiation for various temperatures from 90 to 120 K. Also shown in Figure 2 is the photocurrent measured at 80 K with the device illuminated from the 300-K background radiation (field of view = 53°).