Interband Tunneling for Hole Injection in III-Nitride Ultra-violet Emitters

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that polarization-engineered interband tunneling significantly improves hole injection efficiency in III-Nitride ultraviolet emitters, enabling higher performance and lower-cost UV light sources.

Contribution

It introduces the use of polarization-engineered tunnel junctions to enhance hole injection in UV emitters, a novel approach for improving efficiency in wide band gap semiconductors.

Findings

Polarization-engineered tunnel junctions increase tunneling probability by several orders of magnitude.

Enhanced hole injection leads to more efficient UV light emitters.

The approach enables lower cost and higher efficiency UV LEDs and lasers.

Abstract

Ultra-violet emitters have several applications in the areas of sensing, water purification, and data storage. While the III-Nitride semiconductor system has the band gap region necessary for ultraviolet emission, achieving efficient ultraviolet solid state emitters remains a challenge due to the low p-type conductivity and high contact resistance in wide band gap AlGaN-based ultra-violet light emitters. In this work, we show that efficient interband tunneling can be used for non-equilibrium injection of holes into ultraviolet emitters. Polarization-engineered tunnel junctions were used to enhance tunneling probability by several orders of magnitude over a PN homojunction, leading to highly efficient tunnel injection of holes to ultraviolet light emitters. This demonstration of efficient interband tunneling introduces a new paradigm for design of ultra-violet light emitting diodes and diode lasers, and enables higher efficiency and lower cost ultra-violet emitters.