Carrier and defect dynamics in photoexcited semi-insulating epitaxial GaN layers

Transients of fast free-carrier recombination and of multitrapping processes, determined by different types of defects, have been traced by photoluminescence (PL) and contact photoconductivity (CPC) in semi-insulating GaN epitaxial layers. To eliminate effects caused by the electrodes, the CPC decays were supplemented with noninvasive microwave absorption transients. The lifetimes of fast recombination and initial free-carrier capture processes were evaluated using ultraviolet (UV) time-resolved photoluminescence transients. The UV PL band peaked at 3.42 eV with contributions from both stimulated and spontaneous emission was attributed to band-to-band recombination. At the highest excitations, the initial PL decay time exhibited a value of 880 ps due to nonradiative free-carrier recombination. The radiative centers were revealed in continuous-wave PL spectra, where the UV band was accompanied with the bands of blue (B) PL, peaked in the range of 2.82-3.10 eV, and yellow (Y) PL, peaked at 2.19 eV, ascribed to dislocations and bulk donor-acceptor recombination, respectively. The time scale of the relaxation rate exhibited a crossover from picoseconds for stimulated emission to hundreds of nanoseconds for multitrapping. In the asymptotic part, a stretched-exponent decay on the millisecond scale was observed with the disorder factor of alpha=0.7. The asymptotic decay is explained by competition of centers of nonradiative recombination within bulk of the material and trapping attributed to the dislocations. Behavior of the dislocation-attributed capture centers was simulated using a model of capture cross section, which depends on the excess carrier concentration via screening. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.