Effect of the Built-In Strain on the In-Plane Optical Anisotropy of m-Plane GaN/AlGaN Quantum Wells

Abstract

We study theoretically the influence of the anisotropic biaxial strain originating from the lattice mismatch between the m-plane GaN/AlGaN quantum wells structure and the substrate on the optical anisotropy of such systems. It is demonstrated that the oscillator strengths for optical transitions with polarization of light parallel and perpendicular to the crystal axis c strongly depend on strain to such an extent that, by increasing the concentration of Al in the substrate from x = 0 to x = 0.5 one can change the polarization of the emitted light with respect to the c-axis by 90 degrees.