Critical Mg doping on the blue-light emission in p-type GaN thin films grown by metal–organic chemical-vapor deposition

Abstract

The photoluminescence and photocurrent from p-type GaN films were investigated at temperatures of 30 and 297 K for various Mg-doping concentrations. At a low Mg-doping level, there exists a photoluminescence center of the donor and acceptor pair transition at the 3.28 eV band. This center correlates with the defects for a shallow donor of the VGa and for an acceptor of MgGa. The acceptor level shows a binding energy of 0.2–0.25 eV, which was observed by measuring the photocurrent signal at a photon energy of 3.02–3.31 eV. At a high Mg-doping level, we found a photoluminescence center of a deep donor and acceptor pair transition of the 2.76 eV blue band. This center is attributed to the defect structures of MgGa –VN for the deep donor and MgGa for the acceptor. For low-doped samples, thermal annealing provides an additional photocurrent signal for unoccupied deep acceptor levels of 0.87–1.35 eV above the valence band, indicating p-type activation.