Effects of nitrogen incorporation and thermal annealing on the optical and spin properties of GaPN dilute nitride alloys

Miguel Angel Gonzalez Balanta (1, 2) , P. B. Alves de Oliveira (1) , H. Albalawi (1, 3) , Yara Galvão Gobato (1) , Helder Vinícius Avanço Galeti (1) , A.D. Rodrigues (1) , Mohamed Henini (4) , Samy Almosni (5) , Cédric Robert Robert (6) , Andrea Balocchi (6) , Yoan Léger (5) , Hélène Carrère (6) , Mounib Bahri (7) , Gilles Patriarche (7) , Xavier Marie (6) , Charles Cornet (5)

1 UFSCar - Federal University of São Carlos
2 Universidade Federal de Uberlândia - UFU (BRAZIL)
3 Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University
4 UON - University of Nottingham, UK
5 Institut FOTON - Institut des Fonctions Optiques pour les Technologies de l'informatiON
6 LPCNO - Laboratoire de physique et chimie des nano-objets
7 C2N - Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies

Here, we report on the structural, optical and magneto-optical properties of as-grown and thermal annealed GaPN thin films containing different N concentrations grown by Solid-Source Molecular Beam Epitaxy on GaP substrates. A wide range of characterization techniques were used to investigate the effect of N incorporation and thermal annealing effect of GaPN/GaP epilayers for a N content between 0.5% and 3%. Our results have shown that as we increase the N content the PL peak energy presents a red shift which is explained by a band gap reduction. However, important effects of exciton localization on optical properties were also evidenced from cw and time resolved PL (PLRT) and magneto-PL. Our results have demonstrated that as the concentration of N is increased, exciton localization effect is enhanced. A substantial improvement of the optical quality and spin properties of the epilayers has been observed after thermal annealing which are significantly more important for samples with higher nitrogen contents.

Keywords: Dilute nitrides; Semiconductor alloys; Optical properties; Solar cells; GaPN

Domains: Physics [physics]; Condensed Matter [cond-mat]

Miguel Angel Gonzalez Balanta, P. B. Alves de Oliveira, H. Albalawi, Yara Galvão Gobato, Helder Vinícius Avanço Galeti, et al.. Effects of nitrogen incorporation and thermal annealing on the optical and spin properties of GaPN dilute nitride alloys. Journal of Alloys and Compounds, 2020, 814, pp.152233. ⟨10.1016/j.jallcom.2019.152233⟩. ⟨hal-02351836⟩