Effect of carrier drift-diffusion transport process on thermal quenching of photoluminescence in GaN

Abstract

Thermal quenching of the defect-related photoluminescence (PL) has been widely used to determine the fundamental properties of point defects in GaN such as the activation energy (E t ) and capture cross section. However, in the present work, we have shown using drift-diffusion modeling and experimental analysis that the thermal quenching of defect-related PL from GaN does not only depend of the defect parameters but also is strongly governed by the carrier drift and diffusion in the depletion region. In particular, we have found that these processes significantly influence the slope of PL thermal quenching and temperature T ₀ at which the quenching begins. As a result, E t obtained from the Arrhenius plot of the defect-related PL intensity in GaN provides the correct values of the defect activation energy only in the case of low surface state density ( D 0 < 10 11 cm⁻²eV⁻¹) corresponding to the weak surface band bending. However, in the case of high D ₀ giving rise to the significant surface band bending, the E t value should be cautiously interpreted because it may not correspond entirely to the real defect activation energy due to the drift-diffusion process. Finally, we have shown that our finding can explain in a coherent manner various anomalous behaviors of PL thermal quenching reported in the literature, such as tunable, abrupt or sample dependent thermal quenching. We believe that our findings can be very interesting for nitride growth technology community and optoelectronic device applications.