Terahertz photonics

Abstract:

Intrinsic and extrinsic optoelectronic properties are unraveled for formamidinium tin triiodide (FASnI3) thin films, whose background hole doping density was varied through SnF2 addition during film fabrication. Monomolecular charge-carrier recombination exhibits both a dopant-mediated part that grows linearly with hole doping density and remnant contributions that remain under tin-enriched processing conditions. At hole densities near 1020 cm-3, a strong Burstein-Moss effect increases absorption onset energies by ~300meV beyond the band gap energy of undoped FASnI3 (shown to be 1.2 eV at 5 K and 1.35 eV at room temperature). At very high doping densities (1020 cm-3), temperature-dependent measurements indicate that the effective charge-carrier mobility is suppressed through scattering with ionized dopants. Once the background hole concentration is nearer 1019 cm-3 and below, the charge-carrier mobility increases with decreasing temperature according to ~T-1.2, suggesting it is limited mostly by intrinsic interactions with lattice vibrations. For the lowest doping concentration of 7.2´1018 cm^-3, charge-carrier mobilities reach a value of 67 cm2V-1s-1at room temperature and 470 cm2V-1s-1 at 50 K. Intra-excitonic transitions observed in the THz-frequency photoconductivity spectra at 5K reveal an exciton binding energy of only 3.1 meV for FASnI3, in agreement with the low bandgap energy exhibited by this perovskite.

Abstract:

Characterisation of materials often requires the use of a substrate to support the sample being investigated. For optical characterisation at terahertz frequencies, quartz is commonly used owing to its high transmission and low absorption at these frequencies. Knowledge of the complex refractive index of quartz is required for analysis of time-domain terahertz spectroscopy and optical pump terahertz probe spectroscopy for samples on a quartz substrate. Here, we present the refractive index and extinction coefficient for α-quartz between 0.5 THz and 5.5 THz (17–183 cm^−1) taken at 10, 40, 80, 120, 160, 200 and 300 K. Quartz shows excellent transmission and is thus an ideal optical substrate over the THz band, apart from the region 3.9 ± 0.1 THz owing to a spectral feature originating from the lowest energy optical phonon modes. We also present the experimentally measured polariton dispersion of α-quartz over this frequency range.