Photo-induced strain imaging of semiconductors

This paper presents a novel method for high-resolutions imaging of band-gap energies of semiconductors. When electron-hole pairs are generated in a semiconductor irradiated with a laser, they induce electronic strains in the semiconductor. The electronic strains can be detected and imaged by a scanning probe microscope. The electron-hole-pair generation depends on the band-gap and photon energies. When there are variations in band-gap energies in a sample, strains could be detected in regions having narrower gaps than the irradiated photon energy, and so their distributions can be imaged. The threshold of electron-hole-pair generation can be varied by changing the irradiated photon energies. Consequently, we can quantitatively image the band-gap energy distributions of semiconductors.