Emission properties of a-plane GaN grown by metal-organic chemical-vapor deposition -: art. no. 093519

We report on the emission properties of nonpolar a-plane GaN layers grown on r-plane sapphire. Temperature-, excitation- density-, and polarization-dependent photoluminescences and spatially resolved microphotoluminescence and cathodoluminescence are employed in order to clarify the nature of the different emission bands in the 3.0-3.5 eV spectral range. In the near band-edge region the emission lines of the donor-bound excitons (3.472 eV) and free excitons (3.478 eV) are resolved in the polarized low-temperature spectra, indicating a good quality of the layers. At low energies two other emissions bands with intensity and shape varying with the excited area are observed. The 3.42 eV emission commonly attributed to the excitons bound to basal plane stacking faults shows thermal quenching with two activation energies (7 and 30 meV) and an S-shaped temperature dependence of the peak position. This behavior is analyzed in terms of hole localization in the vicinity of the stacking faults. The emission band that peaked at 3.29 eV is found to blueshift and saturate with increasing excitation intensity. The spatially resolved cathodoluminesence measurements show that the emission is asymmetrically distributed around the triangular-shaped pits occurring at the surface. The 3.29 eV emission is suggested to involve impurities, which decorate the partial dislocation terminating the basal stacking faults. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.