Power-dependent lateral photovoltaic effect in a-Si:H/c-Si p-i-n structure at different temperatures

• Position sensitivity tends to saturate with increasing laser power.
• Position sensitivity shows a nonlinear decreasing behavior with temperature.
• These results were ascribed to reduction of SB height and ITO layer resistivity.

In this letter, we report the power-dependent lateral photovoltaic effect (LPE) in a-Si:H/c-Si p-i-n structure at different temperatures for the first time. It was found that the position sensitivities of different temperatures all have the similar tendency, which increases gradually until become saturated with increasing laser power from 0.1 mW to 70 mW due to the competition between the increase number of generated electron-hole pairs and the increase of recombination probability. Moreover, the LPE of different laser powers all decreased considerably with decreasing temperature from 295 K to 80 K, and the saturated position sensitivity of 15.31 mV/mm at 295 K is about 21.26 times as large as that of 80 K, which can be ascribed to both the temperature-dependent Schottky barrier (SB) height and indium tin oxide (ITO) layer resistivity.