Considerably long carrier lifetimes in high-quality 3C-SiC(111)

As a challenge and consequence due to its metastable nature, cubic silicon carbide (3C-SiC) has only shown inferior material quality compared with the established hexagonal polytypes. We report on growth of 3C-SiC(111) having a state of the art semiconductor quality in the SiC polytype family. The x-ray diffraction and low temperature photoluminescence measurements show that the cubic structure can indeed reach a very high crystal quality. As an ultimate device property, this material demonstrates a measured carrier lifetime of 8.2 mu s which is comparable with the best carrier lifetime in 4 H-SiC layers. In a 760-mu m thick layer, we show that the interface recombination can be neglected since almost all excess carriers recombines before reaching the interface while the surface recombination significantly reduces the carrier lifetime. In fact, a comparison of experimental lifetimes with numerical simulations indicates that the real bulk lifetime in such high quality 3C-SiC is in the range of 10-15 mu s. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4729583]