Conductivity of nanoporous InP membranes investigated using terahertz spectroscopy

We have investigated the conductivity of equilibrium and photoexcited electrons in nanoporous indium phosphide (InP) of various porosities and of two orientations: (100) and (111). We observed an enhanced transmission through the nanoporous samples compared with bulk InP, resulting from a suppression of the conductivity by the pores. The frequency-dependent conductivity was extracted numerically from the transmission data. We examined the dynamical conductivity of photoexcited carriers using optical-pump THz-probe spectroscopy. After the rapid photoexcitation of electrons, the time-resolved conductivity was observed to decay slowly, with carrier recombination lifetimes exceeding Ins for all (100)- and (111)-oriented samples.