Theoretical study of time-resolved luminescence in semiconductors. IV. Lateral inhomogeneities

Abstract

In the fourth part of this series, we study the impact of lateral inhomogeneities on the time-resolved luminescence decay (TRL) after a pulsed excitation by means of simulation with Synopsys® TCAD and analytical approximation. This work consists of two parts: In the first part, the effect of excitations being inhomogeneous on a lateral scale is investigated. It turns out that for localized excitations there may be a strong lateral diffusion of charge carriers, thereby limiting the resolution of a micro-TRL experiment. In this case, a replacement of the inhomogeneous excitation in the simulation by a homogeneous excitation and an average photon density is not possible, especially due to defect saturation depending non-linearly on the excitation. In the second part, we consider a homogeneous excitation and study inhomogeneous material parameters, namely, inhomogeneous charge carrier lifetimes, band gaps, and doping densities. We find that their effects strongly depend on their characteristic lengths of variation. For length scales smaller than the diffusion length, inhomogeneous material parameters can lead to curved luminescence decays.