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Decrease in the binding energy of donors in heavily doped GaN:Si layers

  • Electronic Properties of Semiconductors
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Abstract

The properties of Si-doped GaN layers grown by molecular-beam epitaxy from ammonia are studied by photoluminescence spectroscopy. It is shown that the low-temperature photoluminescence is due to the recombination of excitons bound to donors at Si-atom concentrations below 1019 cm−3. At a Si-atom concentration of 1.6 × 1019 cm−3, the band of free excitons is dominant in the photoluminescence spectrum; in more heavily doped layers, the interband recombination band is dominant. A reduction in the binding energy of exciton-donor complexes with increasing doping level is observed. With the use of Haynes rule, whereby the binding energy of the complex in GaN is 0.2 of the donor ionization energy E D , it is shown that E D decreases with increasing Si concentration. This effect is described by the dependence {ie1134-1}, where E otp D is the ionization energy of an individual Si atom in GaN. The coefficient that describes a decrease in the depth of the impurity-band edge with increasing Si concentration is found to be α = 8.4 × 10−6 meV cm−1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Semiconductor Physics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia

    I. V. Osinnykh, K. S. Zhuravlev & T. V. Malin

  2. Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia

    K. S. Zhuravlev

  3. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 194021, Russia

    B. Ya. Ber & D. Yu. Kazantsev

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  1. I. V. Osinnykh
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  2. K. S. Zhuravlev
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  3. T. V. Malin
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Correspondence to I. V. Osinnykh.

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Original Russian Text © I.V. Osinnykh, K.S. Zhuravlev, T.V. Malin, B.Ya. Ber, D.Yu. Kazantsev, 2014, published in Fizika i Tekhnika Poluprovodnikov, 2014, Vol. 48, No. 9, pp. 1164–1168.

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Osinnykh, I.V., Zhuravlev, K.S., Malin, T.V. et al. Decrease in the binding energy of donors in heavily doped GaN:Si layers. Semiconductors 48, 1134–1138 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063782614090176

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063782614090176

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