Optical absorption of Mg-doped layers and InGaN quantum wells on c-plane and semipolar GaN structures

Abstract

We studied optical absorption of Mg-doped AlInGaN layers using excitation-position dependent and polarization resolved photoluminescence from the slab-waveguide edge of a laser structure. The major absorption in the Mg-doped layers was found only when p-doping is activated. It increases with the removal of residual hydrogen, which in case of Mg doping is a p-type passivation impurity, and reversibly disappears after passivation by hydrogen. This absorption is weakly wavelength and temperature dependent, and isotropic. This can be attributed to acceptor-bound hole absorption, because those holes concentration is nearly equal to that of activated acceptors and weakly temperature dependent (unlike the free hole concentration, which is much lower and is an exponential function of temperature due to high ionization energy). The cross section of photon absorption on such activated acceptor was quantified to be in the order of 10−17 cm−2. The absorption cross section of free electrons was found to be at least one order of magnitude lower and below detection limit. The same technique was used to experimentally quantify band structure polarization components along basis directions for green InGaN quantum wells (QWs) grown on c- and semipolar planes. The A1 and B1 valence subbands of c-plane QW were found to comprise mostly |X⟩ and |Y⟩ states. There was rather minor amount of |Z⟩ states with average square fraction of only 0.02. In (20-21) plane, due to small band anticrossing near gamma-point, we observed highly polarized absorption edges of A1- and B1-subbands consisting mainly of |Y⟩ and |X⟩ states, respectively, and found their energy splitting to be ∼40 meV. For (11-22) plane with smaller band splitting and polarization, we observed polarization switching with indium (In) concentration greater than 30% in the QW (or photon energy less than 2.3 eV). We confirmed our study of valence band structures by optical gain measurements.