Abstract: The influence of hydrogenation on the dark current mechanism of HgCdTe photovoltaic detectors is studied. The hydrogenation is achieved by exposing samples to a H2/Ar plasma atmosphere that was produced during a reactive ion etching process. A set of variable-area photomask was specially designed to evaluate the hydrogenation effect. It was found that the current–voltage characteristics were gradually improved when detectors were hydrogenated by different areas. The fitting results of experimental results at reverse bias conditions sustained that the improvement of current–voltage curves was due to the suppression of trap assisted tunneling current and the enhancement of minority lifetime in the depletion region. It was also found that the dominative forward current was gradually converted from a generation–recombination current to a diffusion current with the enlargement of the hydrogenation area, which was infered from the ideality factors by abstraction of forward resistance–voltage curves of different detectors.

Key words: hydrogenation