which are environmentally friendly and enable portability and high efficiency. Up to date, great progress has been made on the UVC light-emitting diodes (LEDs) by using active regions of AlGaN multiple quantum wells (MQWs) .[8-14] However, the optical output power of current UVC LEDs drops significantly as the light emission wavelength gets shorter. Those LEDs suffer from poor hole injection efficiency in high-Al-content p-type AlGaN, low internal quantum efficiency (IQE) caused by large-lattice-mismatch heteroepitaxy, and strong quantum-confined Stark effect (QCSE), as well as the absorption by the nontransparent GaN contact layers. [15][16][17] A promising approach that dramatically improves the light output power is electron-beam (e-beam) pumping, especially for the short-wavelength UVC spectral range. [3,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24] This approach allows one to bypass the need for p-type or n-type injection layers and, thus, can largely increase the carrier injection efficiency. This provides a unique advantage over conventional LEDs at UVC range, since the p-type doping for high-Al-content AlGaN is High-output-power electron-beam (e-beam) pumped deep ultraviolet (DUV) light sources, operating at 230-270 nm, are achieved by adjusting the well thickness of binary ultrathin GaN/AlN multiple quantum wells. These structures are fabricated on high-quality thermally annealed AlN templates by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition. Owing to the reduced dislocation density, large electron-hole overlap, and efficient carrier injection by e-beam, the DUV light sources demonstrate high output powers of 24.8, 122.5, and 178.8 mW at central wavelengths of 232, 244, and 267 nm, respectively. Further growth optimization and employing an e-gun with increased beam current lead to a record output power of ≈2.2 W at emission wavelength of ≈260 nm, the key wavelength for water sterilization. This work manifests the practical levels of high-output-power DUV light sources operated by using e-beam pumping method. The ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article can be found under https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201801763.Solid-state deep ultraviolet (DUV) optoelectronic devices in the spectral range of 200-280 nm, i.e., ultraviolet-C (UVC), have attracted much attention for their wide applications in sterilization, medical treatment, security, solar-blind photodetection, and so on. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Currently, Al(Ga)N material system is the most promising candidate for solid-state UVC light sources

Monolayer (ML)-scale GaN/AlN multiple quantum well (MQW) structures for electron-beam-pumped ultraviolet (UV) emitters are grown on c-sapphire substrates by using plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy under controllable metal-rich conditions, which provides the spiral growth of densely packed atomically smooth hillocks without metal droplets. These structures have ML-stepped terrace-like surface topology in the entire QW thickness range from 0.75–7 ML and absence of stress at the well thickness below 2 ML. Satisfactory quantum confinement and mitigating the quantum-confined Stark effect in the stress-free MQW structures enable one to achieve the relatively bright UV cathodoluminescence with a narrow-line (~15 nm) in the sub-250-nm spectral range. The structures with many QWs (up to 400) exhibit the output optical power of ~1 W at 240 nm, when pumped by a standard thermionic-cathode (LaB6) electron gun at an electron energy of 20 keV and a current of 65 mA. This power is increased up to 11.8 W at an average excitation energy of 5 µJ per pulse, generated by the electron gun with a ferroelectric plasma cathode at an electron-beam energy of 12.5 keV and a current of 450 mA.

This article describes GaN/AlN heterostructures for ultraviolet-C (UVC) emitters with multiple (up to 400 periods) two-dimensional (2D)-quantum disk/quantum well structures with the same GaN nominal thicknesses of 1.5 and 16 ML-thick AlN barrier layers, which were grown by plasma-assisted molecular-beam epitaxy in a wide range of gallium and activated nitrogen flux ratios (Ga/N2*) on c-sapphire substrates. An increase in the Ga/N2* ratio from 1.1 to 2.2 made it possible to change the 2D-topography of the structures due to a transition from the mixed spiral and 2D-nucleation growth to a purely spiral growth. As a result, the emission energy (wavelength) could be varied from 5.21 eV (238 nm) to 4.68 eV (265 nm) owing to the correspondingly increased carrier localization energy. Using electron-beam pumping with a maximum pulse current of 2 A at an electron energy of 12.5 keV, a maximum output optical power of 50 W was achieved for the 265 nm structure, while the structure emitting at 238 nm demonstrated a power of 10 W.

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