Optical studies of InN epilayers on Si substrates with different buffer layers

Abstract

We have investigated the photoluminescence (PL) and time-resolved PL from the InN epilayers grown on Si substrates with different buffer layers. The narrowest value of the full width at half maximum of the PL peak is 52 meV with the AlN/AlGaN/GaN triple buffer layer, which is better than previous reports on similar InN epilayers on Si substrates. Based on the emission-energy dependence of the PL decays, the localization energy of carriers is also the least for the InN with a triple buffer layer. According to the x-ray diffraction measurements, we suggest that the reduced lattice mismatch between the InN epilayer and the top buffer layer is responsible for improvement of sample quality using the buffer-layer technique. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.