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Investigating surface effects of GaN nanowires using confocal microscopy at below-band gap excitation

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Abstract

We analyze the microscopic origins of subgap photoexcitations of individual gallium nitride (GaN) triangular cross-section nanowires (NWs), which are highly photoactive over a broadband spectral range. Using confocal hyperspectral photoluminescence (PL) microscopy, mid-gap states on the NWs were excited using subgap illumination, resulting in two distinct PL spectra corresponding to the polar (0001) and the semipolar \(\left({\bar 1101} \right)/\left({1\bar 101} \right)\) surfaces. Emission spectra are well represented by Gaussian functions with fitted centers of 1.99 ± 0.01 eV and 2.26 ± 0.01 eV, respectively. PL collected from the end facets exhibits interference fringes and a relative blue shift. Furthermore, the PL spectrum shifts strongly to the blue when the excitation intensity is increased. These observations are consistent with a qualitative model in which the PL results from excitation into a broad manifold of surface-associated states which are rapidly populated at a high excitation intensity and can couple to etalon modes via longitudinal photon emission.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Anil Ghimire and Yuchen Yang for facilitating data collection and Michael Reshchikov and Michael Scarpulla for insightful discussion. We would also like to thank Michael Palmer for assistance. This work was supported by a Scialog grant awarded to JMG by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Work at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84112, USA

    Lauren R. Richey-Simonsen, Nicholas J. Borys & Jordan M. Gerton

  2. Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Nicholas J. Borys, Tevye R. Kuykendall, P. James Schuck & Shaul Aloni

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  1. Lauren R. Richey-Simonsen
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Correspondence to Jordan M. Gerton.

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Richey-Simonsen, L.R., Borys, N.J., Kuykendall, T.R. et al. Investigating surface effects of GaN nanowires using confocal microscopy at below-band gap excitation. Journal of Materials Research 32, 4076–4086 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2017.361

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