Doping concentration dependence of the photoluminescence spectra of n-type GaAs nanowires.

In this letter, the photoluminescence spectra of n-type doped GaAs nanowires, grown by the metal organic chemical vapor deposition method, are measured at 4K and 77 K. Our measurements indicate that an increase in carrier concentration leads to an increase in the complexity of the doping mechanism, which we attribute to the formation of different recombination centers. At high carrier concentrations, we observe a blueshift of the effective band gap energies by up to 25 meV due to the Burstein-Moss shift. Based on the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the photoluminescence peaks, we estimate the carrier concentrations for these nanowires, which varies from 6 × 1017 cm–3 (lightly doped), to 1.5 × 1018 cm–3 (moderately doped), to 3.5 × 1018 cm–3 (heavily doped) as the partial pressure of the disilane is varied from 0.01 sccm to 1 sccm during the growth process. We find that the growth temperature variation does not affect the radiative recombination mechanism; however, it does lead to a slight enhancement in the optical emission intensities. For GaAs nanowire arrays measured at room temperature, we observe the same general dependence of band gap, FWHM, and carrier concentration on doping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]