Instytut Wysokich Ciśnień

Nitride based materials still suffer from the lack of the understanding of the mechanisms of defects formation and their impact on the material properties. Dr Piotr Kruszewski with his collaborators from NL12 laboratory recently used deep-level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) to study Al_xGa_1-xN (x<0.05) grown by MOVPE.

It was shown that the electron emission signal related to the Fe_Ga (0/-) acceptor level splits into individual components due to aluminum fluctuations in the second-nearest neighbor (2NN) shell around the Fe_Ga impurity atoms. The calculations of the probability of finding a given number of aluminum atoms in the 2NN shell of the Fe_Ga defect agreed well with the experimental concentrations determined from Laplace DLTS peak intensities. This finding shows that in dilute Al_xGa_1-xN layers grown by MOVPE, aluminum and iron atoms are randomly distributed in the material. Finally, it was demonstrated that the energy level of the Fe_Ga acceptor with no Al atoms in the 2NN shell in the Al_xGa_1-xN samples shifts linearly with the aluminum content.

The publication "Alloy splitting of the Fe_Ga acceptor level in dilute Al_xGa_1−xN" (P. Kruszewski et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 123, 222105 (2023)) is the result of the collaboration with colleagues from the Photon Science Institute and Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Manchester cooperating in NCN-OPUS project lead by Dr. Piotr Kruszewski.

Fig.1. Three-dimensional diagram of the Al_xGa_1-xN alloy showing two shells of atoms surrounding the Fe_Ga impurity (top image) and Laplace DLTS spectra for the Fe_Ga acceptor state in Al_xGa_1-xN (x ≤ 0.05) samples with energy-level-difference values at X axis (bottom image).