Luminescence decay dynamics of self-assembled germanium islands in silicon

The dynamics of the luminescence decay from self-assembled germanium islands embedded in crystalline silicon has been studied for temperatures varied between 16 K and room temperature. We separate the time scale for various dynamical processes by time-resolved emission spectroscopy and identify a characteristic time scale of Auger recombination processes around 10 ns largely independent on temperature, while two slower decay components appear on time scales around 1 mu s and 10 mu s, respectively, at low temperatures. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3559230]