Free-to-bound and bound exciton transitions at isoelectronic impurities: GaP(Zn,O)

DiDomenico, M and Dishman, JM and Sinha, KP (1971) Free-to-bound and bound exciton transitions at isoelectronic impurities: GaP(Zn,O). In: Physical Review B, 4 (4). pp. 1270-1277.

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Abstract

We show, for sufficiently high temperatures and sufficiently weak majority-carrier binding energies, that the dominant radiative transition at an isoelectronic acceptor (donor) in p-type (n-type) material consists of the recombination of singly trapped minority carriers (bound by central-cell forces) with free majority carriers attracted by a Coulomb interaction. There are two reasons why the radiative recombination rate of the free-to-bound process is greater than the bound exciton process, which dominates at lower temperatures: (i) The population of free majority-carrier states greatly exceeds that of exciton states at higher temperatures, and (ii) the oscillator strength of the free-to-bound transition is greatly enhanced by the Coulomb attraction between the free carrier and the charged isoelectronic impurity. This enhancement is important for isoelectronic centers and is easily calculable from existing exciton models. We show that the free carrier attracted by a Coulomb interaction can be viewed as a continuum excited state of the bound exciton. When we apply the results of our calculations to the GaP(Zn, O) system, we find that the major part of the room-temperature luminescence from nearest-neighbor isoelectronic Zn-O complexes results from free-to-bound recombination and not exciton recombination as has been thought previously. Recent experiments on impulse excitation of luminescence in GaP(Zn, O) are reevaluated in the light of our calculations and are shown to be consistent with a strong free-to-bound transition. For deep isoelectronic centers with weakly bound majority carriers, we predict an overwhelming dominance of the free-to-bound process at 300°K.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Physical Review B
Publisher:	The American Physical Society
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to The American Physical Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited:	11 Jun 2010 10:07
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 06:08
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/28308

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