Explicit Photogain Theory for Nanowire Photoconductors Validated by TCAD Software Simulations

Low-dimensional photoconductors often have extraordinarily high photogain. However, the classical photogain theory was derived on two misplaced assumptions. We recently established a new explicit photogain theory for photoresponses of silicon nanowires. In this work, we employed the commercial TCAD software Silvaco to validate our newly established theory by tuning the density of surface states and fixed charges in a wide range for channel-continuous and channel-pinched-off nanowires.