Influence of annealing pretreatment in different atmospheres on crystallization quality and UV photosensitivity of gallium oxide films.

Due to their high wavelength selectivity and strong anti-interference capability, solar-blind UV photodetectors hold broad and important application prospects in fields like flame detection, missile warnings, and secure communication. Research on solar-blind UV detectors for amorphous GaO is still in its early stages. The presence of intrinsic defects related to oxygen vacancies significantly affects the photodetection performance of amorphous GaO materials. This paper focuses on growing high quality amorphous GaO films on silicon substrates through atomic layer deposition. The study investigates the impact of annealing atmospheres on GaO films and designs a blind UV detector for GaO. Characterization techniques including atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) are used for GaO film analysis. GaO films exhibit a clear transition from amorphous to polycrystalline after annealing, accompanied by a decrease in oxygen vacancy concentration from 21.26% to 6.54%. As a result, the response time of the annealed detector reduces from 9.32 s to 0.47 s at an external bias of 10 V. This work demonstrates that an appropriate annealing process can yield high-quality GaO films, and holds potential for advancing high-performance solar blind photodetector (SBPD) development.