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Haynes Shockly Experiment Lab

1) The lab experiment aims to use light pulses to create excess carriers in an n-type germanium crystal and then use the Haynes-Schockley experiment and photoconductive decay methods to extract minority carrier properties like diffusion coefficient, mobility, and lifetime. 2) In the Haynes-Schockley experiment, voltage readings are taken as bias voltage is increased to see pulses due to minority carriers. Mobility, diffusion coefficient, and lifetime are then calculated. 3) Photoconductive decay measures exponential decay curves to derive minority carrier lifetime. Lifetime values from the two methods agree within 10%.

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194 views7 pages

Haynes Shockly Experiment Lab

1) The lab experiment aims to use light pulses to create excess carriers in an n-type germanium crystal and then use the Haynes-Schockley experiment and photoconductive decay methods to extract minority carrier properties like diffusion coefficient, mobility, and lifetime. 2) In the Haynes-Schockley experiment, voltage readings are taken as bias voltage is increased to see pulses due to minority carriers. Mobility, diffusion coefficient, and lifetime are then calculated. 3) Photoconductive decay measures exponential decay curves to derive minority carrier lifetime. Lifetime values from the two methods agree within 10%.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

ENSC 3014 Lab 2


Haynes-Schockley Experiment

Aims:
The objective of this lab is to use pulses of light to create excess carriers in an n-type crystal. Then
using two different methods, specifically the Haynes-Schockley experiment and photoconductive
decay to extract minority carrier properties: diffusion coefficient, mobility and lifetime.

Methods:
Part 1: Haynes-Schockley experiment:
A crystal is selected and the serial number is recorded. This will be used to look up the crystals
properties and dimensions. After ensuring the board is powered off, the oscilloscope and
experiment board are connected (see figure 1 and figure 2), and the crystal is inserted.
To test the white light a square wave with frequency 10 Hz and amplitude 2.5V is sent using the
wave generator. The white LED is observed to flash, which confirms a correctly functioning LED.The
wave generator is then set into pulse mode with frequency 1 KHz, pulse width 20 and amplitude
5V. Appropriate divisions and scaling are applied (Ch.1 DC coupled 5V / div, Ch.2 AC coupling 5mV /
div, timebase 100s /div) and averaging is set to 128 samples.
Voltage readings off Channel 1 are taken as bias voltage is increased. 15 readings are taken between
the lowest and highest voltage (4.3 V- 14.2V) required to see the pulses due to minority carriers.
From the output from the oscilloscope

Figure 2: Experiment Board Connections

Part 2: Photoconductive decay


Details of crystals are noted down. Wave generator configured to output 100 Hz square wave,
amplitude 3.5 V. Vbias is set to around 8V and channel 2 is connected to the terminal 1000 x Ipc
which will output the photocurrent times 1000. The results are saved with average waveform over
128 periods. This is then repeated for each crystal.

Results:
Haynes-Schockley Experiment:

Results:
Haynes-Schockley Experiment:
Plotting the 17 oscilloscope traces on one graph, we see that the general shape is similar with
increasing bias voltage dilating the plot in the y axis while compressing in the x axis.

From the important features of each plot of our measured data and comparing with figure 3 we can
extract the values of td, , and V. Compiling these results into a table:
Table 1: Table of results

Figure 3 Oscilloscope output

Using the equations:


=

std

, where d is the distance travelled, and td is the time taken, and is the electric

field given by =
=

(ts)2
16Log[2] 3

V
l

with l the length of the crystal. And,

, the mobility and diffusion coefficient can be calculated:

Table 2: Calcuated values for mobility and diffusion coefficients

The average value for mobility from Table 2 is = 1970.78


= 91.45

cm2
,

and diffusion coefficient

Using the Einsteins relation for diffusion coefficient =

where is Boltzmanns constant, T

is Temperature in Kelvin, q is hole charge and is the hole mobility. We can rearrange to find,

91.451.61019
1.381023300

= 3534

The minority carrier lifetime is calculated by plotting ln(S) as a function of


by V x . The minority carrier lifetime is then just 1/Slope of the plot.

with S approximated

With the fitted model: 12.2436 + 9906.827 we find:


=

1
= 1.0094 104
9906.827

Photoconductive decay:
For each sample, an exponential decay curve ( A(1-e^-k t)+c) is fitted which allows the time constant
to be derived (1/k), which is the minority carrier lifetime.

For Crystal 1:
=

1
= 1.1173 104
8525.59

1
= 1.5329 104
6523.58

For Crystal 2:

Discussion:
Comparison of results:
The accepted value for the mobility of holes in germanium at low concentration is approximately
1900cm^2/Vs. Comparing this with the value calculated from the Haynes-Schockley Experiment
gives a percentage difference:
1970.78 1900
100 = 3.73%
1900
This is a very good result considering the magnitude of the data. The percentage difference in the
mobility of holes using Einsteins relation is:
3534 1900
= 86%
1900
The value from Einsteins relation is significantly different from the accepted value and the value
from the Haynes Schockley Experiment. This could be due to multiple sources of errors throughout
the experiment discussed later.
The longest lifetime of electrons provided from literature for holes in a pure n-type material should
be larger than 10^-4 s. The results from the Haynes-Schockley experiment and the photoconductive
decay experiment are consistent with this. Also comparing our values of carrier lifetime for Crystal 1
from the two different methods show that they are agreement with a percentage difference of
1.1173 1.0094
100 = 9.66%
1.0094

The accepted value for the diffusion coefficient of holes in a germanium semiconductor crystal at
room temperature should be 50

. This is it not consistent with what we found as the

diffusion coefficient from the Haynes- Schockley experiment ( = 91.45

).

Sources of errors:
In this lab there are multiple sources of errors such as the approximation of the Gaussian area. The
approximation of the area as V x would be the area of a square, where we can clearly see from
the plot that it is not just a square. The temperature of the crystal could also heat up as the
experiment ran for longer lengths of time; this could change the way the crystal operates and also
results that depend upon T. Another source of error is that the distance was taken as length/2 this
was just an assumption that the light was injected at the halfway point; where in actual fact the light
would spread and diffuse. A way to improve the results is if more samples are taken to improve the
average convergent values.

Additional research component


The minority carrier parameters are of fundamental importance to semiconductor device modelling
and critical to certain optoelectronic devices. For example, multicrystalline silicon (mc Si) is the
dominant substrate for manufacturing solar cells. The reasons for this include: it has a near ideal
band-gap, good stability, low toxicity, and of course is a low cost material. More than 35% of the
world market consists of these mcSi solar cells. This being said, because the diffusion lengths of mcSi
are typically less than the substrate thickness, cell efficiency is primarily limited by minority carrier
lifetime. So by monitoring and improving the minority carrier lifetime the efficiency of solar cells can
be increased.
Another device where the minority carrier parameters are critical is the Light Emitting Diodes
(L.E.Ds). LEDs are p-n diodes in which the recombination of electrons and holes emit a photon, which
we see as light. This radiative recombination process occurs primarily in direct band gap
semiconductors such as GaAs, InP or GaN. Radiative recombination dominates at high minoritycarrier densities so if we can increase the density of minority carrier the efficiency of the LED
increases as almost every electron injected will recombine with a hole and emit a photon.

References:
Van, B. (2014). Optoelectronic devices. [online] Ecee.colorado.edu. Available at:
http://ecee.colorado.edu/~bart/book/book/chapter4/ch4_6.htm#4_6_2 [Accessed 2 May. 2014]
Stocks, M., Blakers, A. and Cuevas, A. (1996). Processing dependence of minority carrier lifetimes in
multicrystalline silicon. pp.8--11.
Bibliography: Pipe, K., Ram, R. and Shakouri, A. (2002). Minority-carrier thermoelectric devices.
pp.299--301.

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