Cadmium Selenide Interface States Studied by Electrochemical Photocapacitance Spectroscopy

In this paper, the electrochemical photocapacitance spectroscopy (EPS) method, which involves measuring the differential capacitance for the reverse-biased semiconductor in an electrolyte as a function of incident subbandgap light, was applied to further elucidate the nature of interface states on n-CdSe. This method has been shown to be an unusually sensitive means for characterization of deep levels in various semiconductor materials (4). In aqueous electrolytes, the interfacial oxide structure might be expected to be similar to that formed in the ambient atmosphere. A key goal in the present work was to establish unequivocally the location of the state associated with oxygen adsorption. An alternate interpretation for previous data was that the observed states actually resided in the bulk and were rendered detectable by the enhanced thickness of the semiconductor space-charge layer resulting from the negative surface charge associated with adsorbed oxygen.