AIP Advances (Feb 2020)

High-field spatial imaging of charge transport in silicon at low temperature

  • C. Stanford,
  • R. A. Moffatt,
  • N. A. Kurinsky,
  • P. L. Brink,
  • B. Cabrera,
  • M. Cherry,
  • F. Insulla,
  • M. Kelsey,
  • F. Ponce,
  • K. Sundqvist,
  • S. Yellin,
  • B. A. Young

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5131171
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 2
pp. 025316 – 025316-6

Abstract

Read online

We present direct imaging measurements of charge transport across a 1 cm × 1 cm × 4 mm-thick crystal of high purity silicon (∼15 kΩ-cm) at temperatures of 5 K and 500 mK. We use these data to measure lateral diffusion of electrons and holes as a function of the electric field applied along the [111] crystal axis and to verify our low-temperature Monte Carlo software. The range of field strengths in this paper exceed those used in our previous study [R. A. Moffatt et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 114, 032104 (2019)] by a factor of 10 and now encompass the region in which some recent silicon dark matter detectors operate [R. Agnese et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 051301 (2018)]. We also report on a phenomenon of surface charge trapping, which can reduce expected charge collection.