Effect of interaction between deep impurity traps on thermally stimulated currents in semiconductors

We demonstrate that the problem of determining the concentrations of free and trapped charge carriers in wide-gap semiconductors from their thermally stimulated current (TSC) curves for m interacting levels in an implicit difference scheme for numerically solving differential rate equations of TSCs reduces to finding the roots of an algebraic equation of degree m + 1. For two interacting trap levels of the same nature (electron or hole traps), we present an algorithm for numerically solving differential rate equations of TSCs which allows the concentrations of free and trapped charge carriers to be determined. TSC curves can be divided into four types according to their shape (dependent on trap parameters and experimental conditions): “splitting” (two well-resolved peaks separated by a temperature range), “saddle” (a well-defined minimum between two peaks), shoulder (on the high- or low-energy side), and “coalescence-absorption” (one peak). The modeling results are used to interpret an experimental TSC curve for semiconducting InSe and to demonstrate that, to adequately interpret experimental TSC data, one should use a model for the interaction between levels.