Abstract:
With the use of UV-C radiation sterilizers on the rise in the wake of the recent
pandemic, it has become imperative to have health safety systems in place
to curb the ill-effects on humans. This requires detection systems with suitable spectral response to the “invisible to the naked eye” radiation leaks with
utmost sensitivity and swiftness. State of the art deep-UV photodetectors
based on the wide bandgap material gallium oxide have achieved responsivities up to few hundred A W−1
while the minimum response time achieved
is few hundred nanoseconds. However, due to the trade-off between these
two key parameters, the ultimate performance of the photodetectors remains
inadequate. The focus here is to give a thorough review of the gallium oxide
based photodetectors, their recent progress and future prospects. This review
highlights the fundamental physics and the key parameters such as dark current, responsivity, and response time with their dependence on the material
properties. Exploration of the reasons behind current scenario in the field of
gallium oxide is comprehensively and critically analyzed. The key challenges
which limit device performance and inhibit the realization of real-world practical detectors are also described. The lacunae currently plaguing the field is
also discussed with possible remedial solutions.
