Abstract

In Fig. 1 are shown the voltage characteristics of the dark current (solid curves) and 300 K-back- ground photocurrent (dash curve). Comparing these two currents, the background-limited performance can be observed at 50 K when the detector is operated under +0.33 V. The lower the operating temperature is, the higher the applied voltage is. For the dark current at low temperature, it is obvious that the current is divided into two regimes. One of them is dominated by the thermionic emission under low biases. The other is dominated by the thermally assisted tunneling under high bias.

© 2002 Optical Society of America