Incident wavelength and polarization dependence of spectral shifts in β-Ga2O3 UV photoluminescence

Abstract

We report polarization dependent photoluminescence studies on unintentionally-, Mg-, and Ca-doped β-Ga2O3 bulk crystals grown by the Czochralski method. In particular, we observe a wavelength shift of the highest-energy UV emission which is dependent on the pump photon energy and polarization. For 240 nm (5.17 eV) excitation almost no shift of the UV emission is observed between E||b and E||c, while a shift of the UV emission centroid is clearly observed for 266 nm (4.66 eV), a photon energy lying between the band absorption onsets for the two polarizations. These results are consistent with UV emission originating from transitions between conduction band electrons and two differentially-populated self-trapped hole (STH) states. Calcuations based on hybrid and self-interaction-corrected density functional theories further validate that the polarization dependence is consistent with the relative stability of two STHs. This observation implies that the STHs form primarily at the oxygen atoms involved in the original photon absorption event, thus providing the connection between incident polarization and emission wavelength. The data imposes a lower bound on the energy separation between the self-trapped hole states of ~70–160 meV, which is supported by the calculations.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Dec 24, 2018
Source ID
10.1038/s41598-018-36676-7

Entities

People

  • Berardi Sensale-Rodriguez
  • Emmanuel Lotubai
  • Feng Liu
  • Joel B Varley
  • Kelvin G Lynn
  • Michael A. Scarpulla
  • Peter T. Dickens
  • Samuel Sprawls
  • Sriram Krishnamoorthy
  • Steve Blair
  • Vincenzo Lordi
  • Xiaojuan Ni
  • Yunshan Wang

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • National Science Foundation
  • United States Department of Energy

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Materials science
  • Physics

Readers

  • Materials Science and Engineering.
  • Spectroscopy.

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics