β - Ga 2 O 3 thin films have been prepared on (0001) sapphire substrates by the sol-gel method. X-ray diffraction showed that β-Ga2O3 polycrystalline films were formed at heat-treatment temperatures above 600°C. With increasing heat-treatment temperature above 900°C, the lattice constants of the β-Ga2O3 films decreased, while the band gap increased. Planar geometry photoconductive detectors based on the sol-gel prepared β-Ga2O3 thin films have been fabricated. They showed the photoresponse only for the wavelengths shorter than 270nm, which correspond to the solar-blind region. The peak wavelength in the spectral response depended on the heat-treatment temperature in the sol-gel process.

We fabricated β-Ga2O3 photodiodes with a Au Schottky contact on a single crystal substrate and investigated the effect of postannealing on the electrical and optical properties of the photodiodes. The ideality factor improved to near unity by annealing at temperatures above 200 °C; however, the reverse leakage current remained nearly unchanged. The responsivity in the wavelength region below 260 nm was enhanced dramatically by a factor of more than 102 after annealing at 400 °C resulting in maximum responsivity of 103 A/W, accompanied with a contrast ratio of about six orders of magnitude between the responsivities at 240 and 350 nm.

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A deep Ultraviolet (UV) photodiode was fabricated using a heterojunction between β-Ga2O3 with a band gap of 4.9 eV, and 6H-SiC with a band gap of 3.02 eV, and investigated its UV sensitivity. A thin β-Ga2O3 layer (200 nm) was prepared on a p-type 6H-SiC substrate through gallium evaporation in oxygen plasma. The device showed good rectifying properties. Under reverse bias, the current increased linearly with increasing deep-UV light intensity. The responsivity of the photodiode was highest to deep-UV light below a wavelength of 260 nm. The photodiode's response time to deep-UV light was in the order of milliseconds.

We fabricated Ga2O3 photodiodes composed of a Au Schottky contact and a β-Ga2O3 single-crystal substrate with a sol–gel prepared high resistivity cap layer. The photodiodes with the cap layer showed solar-blind photosensitivity under both forward and reverse biases in contrast to conventional Schottky photodiodes. Finally, we proposed energy band diagram of the i-n junction to determine the photodetection mechanism of our photodiodes. The photoconductive device model explained the high responsivity of over 1 A/W at forward bias. In this model, the cap layer behaves like a photoconductor, and the substrate behaves like an electrode that replenishes electrons.