Dominant shallow acceptor enhanced by oxygen doping in GaN

We present new photoluminescence (PL) data of deliberately O-doped and Mg-doped GaN layers grown by MOCVD. The combination of these data with positron annihilation spectroscopy (PAS) and SIMS results obtained on the same samples shows a clear correlation of the PL intensity of the acceptor related emissions at 3.466 and 3.27 eV (at 2 K) with O doping. The acceptor is stable upon annealing in N-2 in our highly resistive samples, while it is known be unstable in p-GaN. Our tentative conclusion is that this very commonly occurring acceptor is either a V-Ga-O-H complex or a second configuration of the Mg acceptor containing H. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.