Photoluminescence study of the annihilation process of donor-bound excitons in ZnO: observation of quantum mechanical interference

Abstract

We report a photoluminescence observation of the coupling of donor-bound excitons and longitudinal optical phonons in high-quality ZnO crystals at 5 K. The first-order phonon Stockes line of donor-bound excitons exhibits a distinct asymmetric line shape with a clear dip at its higher energy side, suggesting that quantum mechanical interference occurs during the annihilation of donor-bound excitons. The donor binding energy is determined to be 49.3 meV from spectral featural.