Auger recombination in heavily carbon-doped GaAs

The recombination parameters in heavily carbon-doped GaAs are of considerable importance to current bipolar transistor technology. Here, we used time-resolved photoluminescence and quantum-efficiency techniques in parallel to measure the very short lifetimes expected at high doping. The samples were isotype double heterostructures, with the structure Al(0.4)Ga(0.6)As/GaAs/Al(0.4)Ga(0.6)As, grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. The doping level was varied from 5×1018 to 1×1020 cm−3 for the samples described here. For doping levels greater than 1×1019 cm−3, the lifetime decreased as the inverse of the cube of the hole density, indicating that phonon and impurity-assisted Auger processes are dominant.

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