Stark broadening of impurity absorption lines by inhomogeneous electric fields in highly compensated germanium

Stark broadening of Zeeman absorption lines caused by inhomogeneous electric fields in highly compensated Ge has been studied by means of far-infrared magneto-optical absorption spectroscopy measurements. A number of transmutation-doped Ge single crystals with a systematically varying compensation ratio were employed. The broadening of the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of an absorption line of the Ga acceptor is studied as a function of excitation light intensity with above-band-gap energy. The FWHM increases with decreasing intensity of the band-edge light excitation. Observation of the theoretically predicted 4/3-power law of Stark broadening, due to ionized impurities, is reported. The line broadening originates in the Stark effect, due to inhomogeneous electric fields caused by the random distribution of ionized impurities. In order to understand the mechanism for the line broadening in detail, a numerical approach based on a Monte Carlo simulation has been performed. The results of this simulation show that the inhomogeneity of the field distribution becomes larger with increasing concentration of ionized impurities. The simulation based on a perfectly random distribution for an initial impurity arrangement gives a fairly good agreement with the experimental results. We conclude that the distribution of impurities in transmutation-doped Ge samples is close to random.