Electrical Properties of High-Quality Stannic Oxide Crystals

Abstract

Single crystals of the wide bandgap semiconductor stannic oxide, SnO2, have been grown and studied electrically. A chemical vapor deposition technique using chlorine transport, no inert carrier gases, and low pressure has been used to grow stannic oxide crystals of higher purity and with almost an order-of-magnitude higher low-temperature Hall mobility, 8800 cm2/V sec at 80°K, than have previously been available. Measurements of Hall mobility, carrier concentration, and resistivity have been made between 20 and 625°K on crystals with room-temperature carrier concentrations between 8×1015 and 2×1018 cm−3. The effects of the crystal anisotropy on these measurements have been investigated and found to be small (all results reported are for the a direction). A donor level ∼35-meV deep due to antimony and another level ascribed to oxygen vacancies at ∼140 meV have been observed. Polar optical mode scattering with a dominant characteristic temperature of 1080°C is the main carrier scattering mechanism above 250°K. Below 250°K acoustic deformation potential scattering dominates. Ionized impurity scattering is eventually important in all samples as the temperature is lowered. A polaron effective mass of 0.39 me has been found consistently in the analyses of the data. A technique of fabricating good Schottky barriers on SnO2 has also been developed and used to measure the net donor concentration in samples. The agreement found between these measurements and Nd from Hall measurements indicates that shallow trapping is not a problem in these crystals.