This thesis presents a study of the optical and electrical characteristics of dopants in HgCdTe, CdZnTe and CdS, three materials that play a major role in industry. HgCdTe and CdZnTe are important for infrared light detection and CdS for the fabrication of solar cells. Layers of those II VI materials are characterized by photoluminescence (PL) and temperature-dependent Hall effect. The PL apparatus, built in house, is equipped with a liquid helium cryostat and allows one to scan the entire range of interest between 1 and 12 µm. We address one of the major problems in current HgCdTe technology: p-type doping by both Hg vacancies and arsenic. Low temperature PL and temperature-dependent Hall measurements are first carried out on HgCdTe layers grown by liquid phase epitaxy (LPE). They yield the activation energies of the 2 the Hg vacancy acceptor levels and reveal the U-negative nature of the Hg vacancy in HgCdTe. HgCdTe layers doped with As during molecular beam epitaxial (MBE) growth are also investigated by PL and the results correlated with existing X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) studies. This work allows us to assign the observed optical transitions to the different arsenic complexes formed before and during activation annealing. Furthermore, a model for alloy disorder is developed to correctly fit the data. More precisely, a Gaussian model for the statistical fluctuation of the gap energy due to alloying is formulated and Boltzmann statistics is then introduced in order to fit both the transmission and the PL spectra. The introduction of such model allows one to find the correct emission peak energies, hence the correct ionization energies. Complementary to the study of HgCdTe layer growth, we examine the optical properties of CdZnTe substrates used for HgCdTe epitaxy. In particular, we correlate the PL spectra with the growth parameters, to understand the anomalous infrared absorption of certain CdZnTe ingots. Last, we became interested in CdS, an intrinsically doped (n-type) material used as transparent junction partner in CdTe in solar cells and visible light detectors. We study the impact of different deposition methods, namely sublimation or chemical bath on a glass substrate, by obtaining the PL spectra of as-grown layers and layers that underwent thermal treatment after deposition. These measurements are finally correlated with the final solar cell efficiency.
