Interference effects in electromodulation spectroscopy applied to GaAs-based structures: A comparison of photoreflectance and contactless electroreflectance

In this letter, we show that the oscillation features (OFs) usually observed in photoreflectance (PR) spectra of GaAs-based structures grown on the n-type GaAs substrate below the GaAs fundamental gap could be eliminated completely by applying the contactless electroreflectance (CER) instead of PR. This finding confirms that the origin of OFs is the modulation of the refractive index in the sample due to the generation of additional carriers by the modulated pump beam. In the case of CER spectroscopy, any additional carriers are not generated during the modulation hence CER spectra are free of OFs. This advantage of CER spectroscopy is very important in investigations of all structures for which OFs are present in PR spectra. In order to illustrate this advantage of CER spectroscopy we show PR and CER spectra measured first for the GaAs epilayer and next for more complicated steplike GaInNAsSb/GaNAs/GaAs quantum well structures. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.