Development of GaInNAsSb alloys: Growth, band structure, optical properties and applications

Abstract

In the past few years, GaInNAsSb has been found to be a potentially superior material to both GaInNAs and InGaAsP for communications wavelength laser applications. It has been observed that due to the surfactant role of antimony during epitaxy, higher quality material can be grown over the entire 1.2 -1.6 µm range on GaAs substrates. In addition, it has been discovered that antimony in GaInNAsSb also works as a constituent that significantly modifies the valence band. These findings motivated a systematic study of GaInNAsSb alloys with widely varying compositions. Our recent progress in growth and materials development of GaInNAsSb alloys and our fabrication of 1.5 -1.6 µm lasers are discussed in this paper. We review our recent studies of the conduction band offset in (Ga,In) (N,As,Sb)/GaAs quantum wells and discuss the growth challenges of GaInNAsSb alloys. Finally, we report record setting long wavelength edge emitting lasers and the first monolithic VCSELs operating at 1.5 µm based on GaInNAsSb QWs grown on GaAs. Successful development of GaInNAsSb alloys for lasers has led to a much broader range of potential applications for this material including: solar cells, electroabsorption modulators, saturable absorbers and far infrared optoelectronic devices and these are also briefly discussed in this paper.

Influence of quantum well inhomogeneities on absorption, spontaneous emission, photoluminescence decay time, and lasing in polar InGaN quantum wells emitting in the blue-green spectral region

“…The inset shows the decay of photoluminescence signal at 505 nm together with the fit by a single-exponential formula a significant part of the pumping intensity is lost due to non-radiative recombination. Higher concentration of native point defects (i.e., the source of non-radiative recombination) is typical for epitaxial structures grown at lower temperatures (such growth conditions are often required to prevent the atom segregation and/or enhance the incorporation of some atoms) [34,35]. The existence of significant concentration of non-radiative centers in our InGaN QW structures is confirmed by TRPL measurements.…”

Monolithic Integration of Diluted-Nitride III–V-N Compounds on Silicon Substrates: Toward the III–V/Si Concentrated Photovoltaics

“…The thickness fringes (also called Pendellösung fringes thickness) that can be seen on the XRD diagram presented in Figure 3 indicate a high crystalline quality along the overall sample thickness. The annealing step has little effect on the XRD diagram figures (not shown here), meaning that the lattice constant remains the same, but has a strong impact on the optical properties as shown in Figure 4, likely due to the nitrogen content homogenization and the health of some point defects not reachable through XRD experiments Aho et al 2013Aho et al , 2014Harris et al 2007). Indeed, the annealed sample presents a blue-shift of the PL peak energy from 1.78 to 1.9 eV, while displaying a 50 times enhancement of the PL intensity with a reduction of the FWHM from 264 to 190 meV.…”

“…This approach has been developed by Harris et al (2007) on the InGaAsN(Sb) material. It consists in growing the GaAsPN diluted-nitride alloy at low growth temperature (480°C), which minimizes the point defects generation and any small phase separation (Harris et al 2007).…”

“…This approach has been developed by Harris et al (2007) on the InGaAsN(Sb) material. It consists in growing the GaAsPN diluted-nitride alloy at low growth temperature (480°C), which minimizes the point defects generation and any small phase separation (Harris et al 2007). Then, an annealing step (800°C, 1 min) suppresses some of the remaining point defects usually encountered in the GaPN-based alloys (Jussila et al 2014), leading to a dramatic improvement of the optical properties (Aho et al 2013(Aho et al , 2014Harris et al 2007).…”

“…It consists in growing the GaAsPN diluted-nitride alloy at low growth temperature (480°C), which minimizes the point defects generation and any small phase separation (Harris et al 2007). Then, an annealing step (800°C, 1 min) suppresses some of the remaining point defects usually encountered in the GaPN-based alloys (Jussila et al 2014), leading to a dramatic improvement of the optical properties (Aho et al 2013(Aho et al , 2014Harris et al 2007). Following this approach, 100-nm-thick GaAsPN layers capped with GaP (10 nm) have been grown by MBE on GaP(001) substrate in order to evaluate the diluted-nitride material's structural and optical qualities.…”