Minority-Carrier Lifetime and Surface Recombination Velocity in Single-Crystal CdTe

We apply an earlier developed method [Kuciauskas et al., IEEE J. Photovoltaics , vol. 3, p. 1319, 2013] to analyze surface and bulk recombination in high-quality undoped single-crystal CdTe. By using two-photon excitation time-resolved photoluminescence, we determined a room-temperature minority-carrier lifetime of 360 ns. This lifetime has weak temperature dependence at 202-295 K. We also show that the high surface recombination velocity (>10⁵ cm/s) typical for single-crystal CdTe was reduced by an order of magnitude to ≈ 1×10⁴ cm/s.