Pyroelectric Photoconductive Diode for Highly Sensitive and Fast DUV Detection

Abstract Detecting high‐energy photons from the deep ultraviolet (DUV) to X‐rays is vital in security, medicine, industry, and science. Wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors exhibit great potential for detecting high‐energy photons. However, the implementation of highly sensitive and high‐speed detectors based on WBG semiconductors has been a huge challenge due to the inevitable deep level traps and the lack of appropriate device structure engineering. Here, a sensitive and fast pyroelectric photoconductive diode (PPD), which couples the interface pyroelectric effect with the photoconductive effect based on tailored polycrystal Ga‐rich GaOx (PGR‐GaOx) Schottky photodiode, is first proposed. The PPD device exhibits ultrahigh detection performance for DUV and X‐ray light. The responsivity for DUV light and sensitivity for X‐ray are up to 10 4 A W −1 and 10 5 µ C Gy air −1 cm −2 , respectively. Especially, the interface pyroelectric effect induced by polar symmetry in the depletion region of the PGR‐GaOx can significantly improve the response speed of the device by 10 5 times. Furthermore, the potential of the device is demonstrated for imaging enhancement systems with low power consumption and high sensitivity. This work fully excavates the potential of the pyroelectric effect for detectors and provides a novel design strategy to achieve sensitive and high‐speed detectors.