Electrical and Optical Properties of Heavily Ge-Doped AlGaN

TL;DR

This study investigates how germanium doping affects the electrical and optical properties of AlGaN layers with varying aluminum content, revealing doping limits, structural stability, and optical behavior related to carrier screening.

Contribution

It provides detailed analysis of Ge doping effects on AlGaN's electrical and optical properties across different compositions, including doping limits and carrier activation.

Findings

Ge does not degrade structure below x=0.15

Carrier concentration decreases with higher Al content

Optical properties show Burstein-Moss shift and carrier screening effects

Abstract

We report the effect of germanium as n-type dopant on the electrical and optical properties of AlxGa1-xN layers grown by plasma assisted molecular-beam epitaxy. The Al content has been varied from x = 0 to 0.66, confirmed by Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, and the Ge concentration was increased up to [Ge] = 1E21 cm-3. Even at these high doping levels Ge does not induce any structural degradation in AlxGa1-xN layers with x below 0.15. However, for higher Al compositions, clustering of Ge forming crystallites were observed. Hall effect measurements show a gradual decrease of the carrier concentration when increasing the Al mole fraction, which is already noticeable in samples with x = 0.24. Samples with x = 0.64-0.66 remain conductive, but the donor activation rate drops to around 0.1% (carrier concentration around 1E18 cm-3 for [Ge] = 1E21 cm-3). From the optical point of view, the low temperature photoluminescence is dominated by the band-to-band emission, which show only spectral shift and broadening associated to the Burstein-Moss effect. The evolution of the photoluminescence peak position with temperature shows that the free carriers due to Ge doping can efficiently screen the potential fluctuations induced by alloy disorder.