| A great deal of interest has emerged in recent years to design novel compound semiconductor materials to fulfill the growing societal needs of efficient light sources, powerful solar cells, miniaturized-electronic-circuitry for lab-on-chip equipment, and a plethora of handheld opto-electronic devices. GaAs-based III-V compounds are significant materials with important fundamental characteristics allowing the scientists and engineers to envision their use in a variety of devices including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), laser diodes (LDs), and high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs).;In this regard, there has been a growing interest of studying the far-infrared optical properties in both un-doped and doped bulk III-V compounds, thin films, ternary alloys, and their nano-structured quantum-wells and superlattices. For GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs materials grown especially by molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE), the optical constants [viz., n, k, N (Charge carrier concentration), R (Reflection), and T (Transmission)] over a broad frequency regime are fundamental inputs that must be known for constructing opto-electronic devices. Despite some success by using Raman Spectroscopy, the influence of free charge carrier concentration on the phonon-plasmon coupled modes (L+/-) by far-infrared (FIR) spectroscopy are still scantily known. Any effort to extract accurate information about the charge carrier concentration N in either n- or p-type doped III-V compounds using FIR would be of significant importance to the scientific community.;In this thesis, we will use the electromagnetic theory to study the IR reflectivity and transmission at oblique incidence in both undoped and doped GaAs, AlxGa1-xAs thin films and superlattices in order to correlate the shifts of the L+/- mode frequencies with the free charge carrier concentration. The transmission study in compound semiconductors for s-polarization reveals a single minimum at the resonance frequency of the TO mode, while for p-polarization the transmission minima occur at both the resonance frequencies of the TO and LO modes. In doped semiconductor thin films, the transmission in p-polarization exhibits minima at TO and L+ with a shift of L+ mode to higher frequency as the charge carrier concentration increases. |
