The Opto-Electronic Properties And Application Of Ga(In)NAs

GalnNAs is a very promising new material for infrared lasers, photo detectors, solor cells and optical integration. It has much more advantages than GalnAsP because much better electron confinement can be achieved in this system, thus much higher the laser's characteristic temperature will be. Though the research on GaNAs and GalnNAs is booming these two or three years, people still have few learning of it and can't even get agreement on some basic understandings because it's still too young. My thesis is trying to get some basic opto-electronic properties of GaNAs and GalnNAs experimentally. Comparison of my experimental results with some popular theories nowadays that are in hot debating will show some proof. It will give us much more understanding on the nitrogen behavior in GaAs and GalnAs.There are mainly three arguments on the physical origin of the new conduction band minimum of GaNAs (or GalnNAs). They are band anti-crossing model, GaAs conduction band mixing model and impurity band model. Our PL spectra under hydrostatic pressure showed that the conduction band minimum is in fact the result of the interaction and mixing of the GaAs conduction band states.People are still arguing that GaNxAs,.x (x<0.1) and GaAs will form type-I or type-II quantum well. We have measured the optical properties of a serial of GaNAs quantum well samples with the same N composition but different well width. Using the calculation based on the effective mass theory, we prove that the GaN00,5As0985/GaAs quantum well should have the type-I alignment.Two results based on different calculation can't get the agreement on whether GaNxAs,_x is semiconductor or semimetal when x is in the widely middle range. We have got the samples with N composition as high as 33% employing the non-equilibrium growth. Using photo-voltage (PV) spectrum we showed that it has a absorption edge of 1.0 eV for ultra-thin superlattice. Though it's impossible now to get the band gap of bulk GaNAs at that N composition, it proves that it's still semiconductor.By changing the composition of N and In, we can adjust the band gap of GalnNAs to about 1.3 m and also make it lattice matched to GaAs. It makes the resonant cavity enhanced (RCE) infrared photo detector based on GaAs become possible. Our result shows that the RCE detector based on this system has very high quantum efficiency and extremely sharp resonant response peak (16 meV)...