In this work, we propose a model to address the challenge of droop in internal quantum efficiency in InGaN/GaN Multiple Quantum Well LEDs. Efficiency droop limits the performance of high brightness LEDs as they operate at currents greater than 350mA. The efficiency droop is a multi-physics problem posed by various entities such as (1) dislocation recombination, (2) Auger recombination in active region, (3) non-radiative recombination, and (4) current overflow in the active region. This work aims at reducing the droop associated with non-radiative recombination by engineering the quantum well barrier thickness and materials. The goals are three-fold, namely: (1) To explore the role of barriers in determining the droop in internal quantum efficiency and to justify the use of multiple barriers to increase the carrier density and reduce the leakage current thereby increase the radiative recombination at higher current densities ; (2) Propose optimum barrier specifications such as number, material combination, and thickness for downscaling the efficiency droop, and thereby improving the device efficiency; and (3) Finally, obtain improved efficiency by engineering the barrier in a realistically-sized device by considering the effects of long-range strain fields in the device.

Ce travail traite de la croissance épitaxiale et de la caractérisation d’hétérostructures àbase de multi-puits quantiques (MPQ) pour des applications dans le photovoltaïque. Leséchantillons ont été obtenus par la technique d’épitaxie en phase vapeur aux organométalliques(EPVOM) sur des substrats de saphir (0001). La caractérisation structurale etoptique est réalisée par diffraction de rayons X, microscopie électronique en transmission,spectroscopie de photoluminescence et de transmission. Pour étudier la présence de l’effetphotovoltaïque et pour estimer la performance électrique des échantillons, les MPQ ont étéintégrés dans la géométrie de cellules solaires en utilisant de la photolithographie, desattaques réactives ioniques assistées par plasma inductif et des métallisations pour contacterles parties dopées n et p.Nous avons étudié l’influence de différents designs des régions actives InGaN/GaN surles propriétés optiques et électriques des échantillons, c’est-à-dire le nombre de puitsquantiques InGaN, les épaisseurs des puits et des barrières et la composition en indium dansles puits. Deux mécanismes principaux doivent être pris en compte pour une optimisationefficace de composants photovoltaïques: l’absorption des photons et la collections desporteurs. Nous avons montré qu’une augmentation du nombre de MPQ, de leur épaisseur etde la composition d’In améliorait l’absorption, mais causait aussi des pertes dans l’efficacitéde collection du fait de l’augmentation de l’épaisseur de la couche active (champ électriqueplus faible), de la difficulté des porteurs pour s’échapper de puits plus profonds et derelaxation des contraintes (création de défauts structuraux). La décroissance de l’épaisseur desbarrières peut résoudre les deux premiers points, mais le problème de la relaxation de lacontrainte reste entier. Pour notre meilleur design, nous obtenons une efficacité de conversionde 2 % pour des couches 15×In0.18Ga0.82N/GaN qui ont une réponse spectrale qui s’étendjusqu’à 465 nm. / In this work we report on epitaxial growth and characterization of InGaN/GaN multiquantumwells (MQWs) heterostructures for application in photovoltaic devices. The sampleswere grown by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) on (0001) sapphire substrate.The structural and optical characterization is performed by X-ray diffraction, transmissionelectron microscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy and transmission measurements. Toinvestigate the presence of photovoltaic effect and estimate the electrical performance of thesamples, they were processed into solar cells by means of the photolithography, inductivelycoupled plasma reactive-ion etching and metallization to manage n and p contacts.We studied the influence of different InGaN/GaN active region designs on thestructural, optical and electrical properties of the samples, i.e. number of InGaN quantumwells, QW and quantum barrier thicknesses and indium composition in the wells. Two mainmechanisms have to be taken into account for an efficient optimization of photovoltaicdevices: photon absorption and carrier collection. We showed that an increase of the MQWsnumber, their thickness and the In-content allows absorption improvement, but causes lossesin the carrier collection efficiency due to: the increase of the active region thickness (lowerelectric field), the difficulty of the carrier to escape from deeper QWs and the strain relaxation(structural defect creation). The decrease of the barrier thickness can solve the first two issues,but the problem with strain relaxation remains. In the best design, we report the value of2.00% of conversion efficiency for 15×In0.18Ga0.82N/GaN samples with spectral responseextending to 465 nm.

Ce travail traite de la croissance épitaxiale et de la caractérisation d’hétérostructures àbase de multi-puits quantiques (MPQ) pour des applications dans le photovoltaïque. Leséchantillons ont été obtenus par la technique d’épitaxie en phase vapeur aux organométalliques(EPVOM) sur des substrats de saphir (0001). La caractérisation structurale etoptique est réalisée par diffraction de rayons X, microscopie électronique en transmission,spectroscopie de photoluminescence et de transmission. Pour étudier la présence de l’effetphotovoltaïque et pour estimer la performance électrique des échantillons, les MPQ ont étéintégrés dans la géométrie de cellules solaires en utilisant de la photolithographie, desattaques réactives ioniques assistées par plasma inductif et des métallisations pour contacterles parties dopées n et p.Nous avons étudié l’influence de différents designs des régions actives InGaN/GaN surles propriétés optiques et électriques des échantillons, c’est-à-dire le nombre de puitsquantiques InGaN, les épaisseurs des puits et des barrières et la composition en indium dansles puits. Deux mécanismes principaux doivent être pris en compte pour une optimisationefficace de composants photovoltaïques: l’absorption des photons et la collections desporteurs. Nous avons montré qu’une augmentation du nombre de MPQ, de leur épaisseur etde la composition d’In améliorait l’absorption, mais causait aussi des pertes dans l’efficacitéde collection du fait de l’augmentation de l’épaisseur de la couche active (champ électriqueplus faible), de la difficulté des porteurs pour s’échapper de puits plus profonds et derelaxation des contraintes (création de défauts structuraux). La décroissance de l’épaisseur desbarrières peut résoudre les deux premiers points, mais le problème de la relaxation de lacontrainte reste entier. Pour notre meilleur design, nous obtenons une efficacité de conversionde 2 % pour des couches 15×In0.18Ga0.82N/GaN qui ont une réponse spectrale qui s’étendjusqu’à 465 nm. / In this work we report on epitaxial growth and characterization of InGaN/GaN multiquantumwells (MQWs) heterostructures for application in photovoltaic devices. The sampleswere grown by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) on (0001) sapphire substrate.The structural and optical characterization is performed by X-ray diffraction, transmissionelectron microscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy and transmission measurements. Toinvestigate the presence of photovoltaic effect and estimate the electrical performance of thesamples, they were processed into solar cells by means of the photolithography, inductivelycoupled plasma reactive-ion etching and metallization to manage n and p contacts.We studied the influence of different InGaN/GaN active region designs on thestructural, optical and electrical properties of the samples, i.e. number of InGaN quantumwells, QW and quantum barrier thicknesses and indium composition in the wells. Two mainmechanisms have to be taken into account for an efficient optimization of photovoltaicdevices: photon absorption and carrier collection. We showed that an increase of the MQWsnumber, their thickness and the In-content allows absorption improvement, but causes lossesin the carrier collection efficiency due to: the increase of the active region thickness (lowerelectric field), the difficulty of the carrier to escape from deeper QWs and the strain relaxation(structural defect creation). The decrease of the barrier thickness can solve the first two issues,but the problem with strain relaxation remains. In the best design, we report the value of2.00% of conversion efficiency for 15×In0.18Ga0.82N/GaN samples with spectral responseextending to 465 nm.

abstract: Light Emitting Diodes even with their longer life, robust build and low power consumption, they are still plagued by some problems the most significant of which are the current droop and thermal droop. Current droop causes a lowering in the Internal Quantum Efficiency with increased current injection while thermal droop lowers the whole Internal Quantum Efficiency curve with increase in temperature. The focus here was understanding effects of thermal droop and develop a method to control it. Shockley Read Hall recombination plays a dominant role in the thermal droop effect when the current injection is low. Since the blue light emitting diode is based on Gallium Nitride, we need to take into consideration the effect of piezoelectric polarization in the quantum wells. The effects of the piezoelectric fields were studied based on the Gallium Nitride plane orientations. It was found in a Gallium Nitride light emitting diodes simulation study that more the number of quantum wells, lower would be the Radiative recombination rate. The problem of exacerbated spatial separation of electron hole wavefunctions in a thick single quantum well structure lead to the development of a dual well structure where one well assisted the other during high temperature operations. The Electron Blocking Layer was reduced in thickness and was made only 10 nm thick with a 5 nm Gallium Nitride buffer between it and the active region wells. The main reason for reducing the electron blocking layer thickness was to reduce the valance band offset and improve hole transport into the active region. Three different dual well designs were simulated of 3nm, 6nm and 9nm wide wells. The output parameters like the Power Spectral Density, Electron bound density, Light Output Power and Electron-Hole wavefunction overlaps were calculated. It was found that one of the wells acted as an assisting well where it had very little radiative recombination activity in it at room temperature. As the temperature increased, it was observed that the electrons in the main well started to overflow out of it and into the assisting well where the radiative recombination rate increased significantly. This lead to a boost in Internal Quantum Efficiency. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2017

In this thesis, I will present and discuss research performed on InGaN/GaN multiple quantum well (QW) structures. The results of which were taken using photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy and PL time decay spectroscopy. In the first two experimental chapters, I report on the effects of QW growth methodology on the optical properties of c-plane InGaN/GaN QWs. I compare structures grown using the single temperature (1T), quasi-two temperature (Q2T), temperature bounced (T-bounced) and two temperature (2T) QW growth methodologies. The T-bounced and 2T structures are observed to have gross well width fluctuations (GWWF), where the QW width varies from 0 to 100 % created when the QWs are exposed to a temperature ramp. Whereas, the 1T and Q2T structures have continuous QWs with only one or two monolayer well width fluctuations. The structures with GWWFs are observed to have a larger room temperature internal quantum efficiency (RT-IQE) at low excitation conditions i.e. below efficiency droop compared to those without. The larger RT-IQE is ascribed to several factors which include an increased radiative recombination rate, increased thermal activation energy of non-radiative recombination and reduced defect density of the QWs. The effect of barrier growth temperature is also investigated. No clear trend is observed between barrier growth temperature and RT-IQE.In the last experimental chapter I report on studies of carrier localisation in InGaN/GaN QWs using resonant PL spectroscopy. The effect of carrier localisation on the independently localised electrons and holes are investigated and the resonant PL spectrum is studied in detail. The InGaN/GaN QW structure is observed to exhibit an effective mobility edge at 12 K where delocalised carriers are created above a particular excitation energy. The emission from the resonantly excited localised states which are accompanied by the emission of a longitudinal optical phonon (resonant LO feature) is investigated as a function of temperature and excitation energy. The integrated PL intensity of the resonant LO feature is observed to quench rapidly with temperature up to around 45 K, independent of excitation energy. The integrated PL intensity of the resonant LO feature is fitted to an Arrhenius model and a thermal activation energy of ∼ 1(±1) meV is extracted. This activation energy is speculated to be consistent with the localisation energy of electrons.

No description available.

The popularity of III-nitride materials has taken up the semiconductor industry to newer applications because of their remarkable properties. In addition to having a direct and wide band gap of 3.4 eV, a very fascinating property of GaN is the band gap tuning from 0.7 to 6.2 eV by alloying with Al or In. The most common orientation to grow optoelectronic devices out of these materials are the polar c-plane which are strongly affected by the intrinsic spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization fields. Devices grown in no polar orientation such as (1 0 –1 0) m-plane or (1 1 –2 0) a-plane have no polarization in the growth direction and are receiving a lot of focus due to enhanced behaviour. The first part of this thesis deals with the development of non-polar epimGaN films of usable quality, on an m-plane sapphire by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy. Growth conditions such as growth temperature and Ga/N flux ratio were tuned to obtain a reasonably good crystalline quality film. MSM photodetectors were fabricated from (1 0 -1 0) m-GaN, (1 1 -2 0) a-GaN and semipolar (1 1 -2 2) GaN films and were compared with the polar (0 0 0 2) c-GaN epilayer. Later part of the thesis investigated (1 0 -1 0) InN/ (1 0 -1 0) GaN heterostructures. Further, we could successfully grow single composition nonpolar a-plane InxGa1-xN epilayers on (1 1 -2 0) GaN / (1 -1 0 2) sapphire substrate. This thesis focuses on the growth and characterisation of nonpolar GaN, InxGa1-xN and InN by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy and on their photodetection potential. Chapter 1 explains the motivation of this thesis work with an introduction to the III-nitride material and the choice of the substrate made. Polarization effect in the polar, nonpolar and semipolar oriented growth is discussed. Fabrication of semiconductor photodetectors and its principle is explained in details. Chapter 2 discusses the various experimental tools used for the growth and characterisation of the film. Molecular beam epitaxy technique is elaborately explained along with details of the calibration for the BEP of various effusion cells along with growth temperature at the substrate. Chapter 3 discusses the consequence of nitridation on bare m-sapphire substrate. Impact of nitridation step prior to the growth of GaN film over (1 0 -1 0) m-sapphire substrate was also studied. The films grown on the nitridated surface resulted in a nonpolar (1 0 -1 0) orientation while without nitridation caused a semipolar (1 1 -2 2) orientation. Room temperature photoluminescence study showed that nonpolar GaN films have higher value of compressive strain as compared to semipolar GaN films, which was further confirmed by room temperature Raman spectroscopy. The room temperature UV photodetection of both films was investigated by measuring the I-V characteristics under UV light illumination. UV photodetectors fabricated on nonpolar GaN showed better characteristics, including higher external quantum efficiency, compared to photodetectors fabricated on semipolar GaN. Chapter 4 focuses on the optimization and characterisation of nonpolar (1 0 -1 0) m-GaN on m-sapphire by molecular beam epitaxy. A brief introduction to the challenges in growing a pure single phase nonpolar (1 0 -1 0) GaN on (1 0 -1 0) sapphire without any other semipolar GaN growth is followed by our results achieving the same. Effect of the growth temperature and Ga/N ratio on the structural and optical properties of m-GaN epilayers was studied and the best condition was obtained for the growth temperature of 7600C and nitrogen flow of 1 sccm. Strain in the film was quantitatively measured using Raman spectroscopy and qualitatively analyzed by RSM. Au/ nonpolar GaN schottky diode was fabricated and temperature dependent I-V characteristics showed rectifying nature. Chapter 5 demonstrates the growth of (1 0 -1 0) m-InN / (1 0 -1 0) m-GaN / (1 0 -1 0) m-sapphire substrate. Nonpolar InN layer was grown at growth temperature ranging from 3900C to 440C to obtain a good quality film at 4000C. An in-plane relationship was established for the hetrostructures using phi-scan and a perfect alignment was found for the epilayers. RSM images on the asymmetric plane revealed highly strained layers. InN band gap was found to be around 0.8 eV from absorption spectra. The valance band offset value is calculated to be 0.93 eV for nonpolar m-plane InN/GaN heterojunctions. The heterojunctions form in the type-I straddling configuration with a conduction band offsets of 1.82 eV. Chapter 6 focuses on the optimization of nonpolar (1 1 -2 0) a-GaN on (1 -1 0 2) r-sapphire by molecular beam epitaxy. Effect of the growth temperature and Ga/N ratio on the structural and optical properties of a-GaN epilayers was studied and the best condition was obtained for the growth temperature of 7600C and nitrogen flow of 1 sccm. An in-plane orientation relationship is found to be [0 0 0 1] GaN || [-1 1 0 1] sapphire and [-1 1 0 0] GaN || [1 1 -2 0] sapphire for nonpolar GaN on r-sapphire substrate. Strain in the film was quantitatively measured using Raman spectroscopy and qualitatively analyzed by RSM. UV photo response of a-GaN film was measured after fabricating an MSM structure over the film with Au. EQE of the photodetectors fabricated in the (0 0 0 2) polar and (1 1 -2 0) nonpolar growth directions were compared in terms of responsively, nonpolar a-GaN showed the best sensitivity at the cost of comparatively slow response time. Chapter 7 demonstrates the growth of non-polar (1 1 -2 0) a-plane InGaN epilayers on a-plane (1 1 -2 0) GaN/ (1 -1 0 2) r-plane sapphire substrate using PAMBE. The high resolution X-ray diffraction (HRXRD) studies confirmed the orientation of the films and the compositions to be In0.19Ga0.81N, In0.21Ga0.79N and In0.23Ga0.77N. The compositions of the films were controlled by the growth parameters such as growth temperature and indium flux. Effect of variation of Indium composition on the strain of the epilayers was analyzed from the asymmetric RSM images. Further, we report the growth of self-assembled non-polar high indium clusters of In0.55Ga0.45N over non-polar (1 1 -2 0) a-plane In0.17Ga0.83N epilayer grown on a-plane (1 1 -2 0) GaN / (1 -1 0 2) r-plane sapphire substrate. The structure hence grown when investigated for photo-detecting properties, showed sensitivity to both infrared and ultraviolet radiations due to the different composition of InGaN region. Chapter 8 concludes with the summary of present investigations and the scope for future work.

In this thesis I present and discuss the results of optical spectroscopy performed on InGaN/GaN single and multiple quantum well (QW) structures. I report on the optical properties of InGaN/GaN single and multiple QW structures, measured at high excitation power densities. I show a correlation exists between the reduction in PL efficiency at high excitation power densities, the phenomenon so-called ``efficiency-droop'', and a broadening of the PL spectra. I also show a distinct change in recombination dynamics, measured by time-resolved photoluminescence (PL), which occurs at the excitation power densities for which efficiency droop is measured. The broadening of the PL spectra at high excitation power densities is shown to occur due to a rapidly redshifting, short-lived high energy emission band. The high energy emission band is proposed to be due to the recombination of weakly localised/delocalised carriers occurring as a consequence of the progressive saturation of the local potential fluctuations responsible for carrier localisation, at high excitation power densities. I report on the effects of varying threading dislocation (TD) density on the optical properties of InGaN/GaN multiple QW structures. No systematic relationship exists between the room temperature internal quantum efficiency (IQE) and the TD density, in a series of nominally identical InGaN/GaN multiple QWs deposited on GaN templates of varying TD density. I also show the excitation power density dependence of the PL efficiency, at room temperatures, is unaffected for variation in the TD density between 2 x107 and 5 x109 cm-2. The independence of the optical properties to TD density is proposed to be a consequence of the strong carrier localisation, and hence short carrier diffusion lengths. I report on the effects of including an InGaN underlayer on the optical and microstructural properties of InGaN/GaN multiple QW structures. I show an increase in the room temperature IQE occurs for the structure containing the InGaN underlayer, compared to the reference. I show using PL excitation spectroscopy that an additional carrier transfer and recombination process occurs on the high energy side of the PL spectrum associated with the InGaN underlayer. Using PL decay time measurements I show the additional recombination process for carriers excited in the underlayer occurs on a faster timescale than the recombination at the peak of the PL spectrum. The additional contribution to the spectrum from the faster recombination process is proposed as responsible for the increase in room temperature IQE.