Relaxation Phenomena in High-Resistivity Ge:Hg

Abstract

Under reduced background conditions a mercury‐doped germanium photoconductor has a slow component of the response time given by the dielectric relaxation time ερ/4π. It has been shown that this is valid for small or very large signals. Further, the dielectric relaxation effects are the same whether the resistance is determined through photo‐generation by background radiation or by thermal generation of holes. The capacitance calculated from the ratio of response time to element resistance is the element capacitance for low‐dislocation material. For germanium with significant lineage this parameter has a value an order of magnitude larger than theory. This indicates rather gross inhomogeneities in lifetime within the crystals. Even for the best crystals 50% of the signal has the long dielectric relaxation response time.