Direct comparison of recombination dynamics in cubic and hexagonal GaN/AlN quantum dots -: art. no. 035312

We report on time-integrated and -resolved photoluminescence (PL) data on self-assembled GaN quantum dots (QD's) embedded in AlN, in both cubic [zinc-blende (ZB)] and hexagonal [wurtzite (Wz)] crystallographic phases. The comparison of the optical properties of ZB and Wz nitride QD's allows us to distinguish pure dimensionality effects from the influence of the large polarization-induced electric fields present in the Wz nanostructures. Specifically, the PL energy of the ZB QD's is always higher than the bulk cubic GaN band-gap energy, in contrast to the Wz QD's where a 7-MV/cm polarization field gives rise to below-gap PL emission for sufficiently large QD's. As a further consequence of the internal field, the low-temperature PL decay times of the Wz QD's are significantly longer than the ZB ones, and increase strongly with the QD height in contrast to the ZB ones, which exhibit only a small size dependence. For both types of QD's, the PL intensity is found to be weakly dependent on temperature, underscoring the strong zero-dimensional exciton localization in the GaN/AlN system. In spite of the strong localization, however, we show that the nonradiative channels cannot be neglected and have a significant contribution in the PL decay time for both ZB and Wz; QD's.