Abstract

We report our results on experimental study of photovoltage, induced by pulsed CO2 laser in GaAs/AlGaAs heterojunctions. We show that photoemission of hot carriers across the potential barrier is the dominant mechanism in formation of the photovoltage. The analysis of the current-voltage characteristic reveals that the photocurrent has maximum at bias voltage related to the potential barrier height of p-n heterojunction. Moreover, we demostrate that the use of heterojunction has an advantage over homojunction in the infrared detection.