Despite the high density of threading dislocations generally found in (AlGaIn)N heterostructures, the light emission efficiency of such structures is exceptionally high. It has become common to attribute the high efficiency to compositional fluctuations or even phase separation in the active GaInN quantum well region. The resulting localization of charge carriers is thought to keep them from recombining nonradiatively at the defects. Here, we show that random disorder is not the key but that under suitable growth conditions hexagonal V-shaped pits decorating the defects exhibit narrow sidewall quantum wells with an effective band gap significantly larger than that of the regular c-plane quantum wells. Thereby nature provides a unique, hitherto unrecognized mechanism generating a potential landscape which effectively screens the defects themselves by providing an energy barrier around every defect.

By using picosecond time-resolved photoluminescence we have measured the lifetime of excess charge carriers in GaN epitaxial layers grown on sapphire at temperatures up to 300 K. The decay time turns out to be dominated by trapping processes at low excitation levels. The radiative lifetime derived from our data is dominated by free excitons at temperatures below 150 K, but also clearly shows the gradual thermal dissociation of excitons at higher temperatures. From our data, we are able to determine the free exciton binding energy and the free carrier radiative recombination coefficient. By combining these data with optical absorption data, we find the interband momentum matrix element and an estimate for the hole effective mass, which is much larger than previously thought.

In this contribution, we focus on the consequences of the piezoelectric field, which is an inherent consequence of the commonly used wurtzite phase of GaN, on the optical properties of strained GaN-based quantum well structures. We demonstrate that both in GaN/AlGaN and in GaInN/GaN single quantum well structures, the piezoelectric field leads to a Stark-shift of the fundamental optical transitions, which can lead to luminescence emission far below the bulk bandgap. Due to the spatial separation of the electron and hole wavefunctions in such structures, the oscillator strength of these transitions may become extremely small, many orders of magnitude lower than in the field-free case. From specially designed structures, we can even determine the sign of the piezoelectric field and relate it to the polarity of the layers. Under high-excitation conditions, as found in a laser diode, the piezoelectric field is almost completely screened by the injected carriers. As a consequence, the stimulated emission is significantly blue-shifted compared to the photoluminescence, which has sometimes been confused with localization effects.

The effects of piezoelectric fields on the static and dynamic optical properties of GaInN/GaN and GaN/AIGaN double heterostructures and single quantum wells are studied by time-resolved photoluminescence. We find a strong increase of the luminescence decay time of the dominating transition with well thickness by several orders of magnitude. For well thicknesses larger than about 5 nm, two emission lines with strongly differing decay times are observed, which are attributed to spatially direct and indirect transitions. Our experimental findings are consistently explained by a quantitative model based on the piezoelectric fields in strained wurtzite quantum wells.

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