Photoreflectance system based on vacuum ultraviolet laser at 177.3 nm

Abstract

Photoreflectance (PR) spectroscopy is a powerful and non-destructive experimental technique to explore interband transitions of semiconductors. In most PR systems, the photon energy of the pumping beam is usually chosen to be higher than the bandgap energy of the sample. To the best of our knowledge, the highest energy of pumping laser in reported PR systems is 5.08 eV (244 nm), not yet in the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) region. In this work, we report the design and construction of a PR system pumped by VUV laser of 7.0 eV (177.3 nm). At the same time, dual-modulated technique is applied and a dual channel lock-in-amplifier is integrated into the system for efficient PR measurement. The system’s performance is verified by the PR spectroscopy measurement of well-studied semiconductors, which testifies its ability to probe critical-point energies of the electronic band in semiconductors from ultraviolet to near-infrared spectral region.