Bright visible light emission from electro-oxidized porous silicon: A quantum confinement effect

Among the various nanometer-sized silicon structures, high porosity anodically oxidized porous silicon has many interesting properties. Luminescence quantum efficiency as high as 3% at room temperature and luminescence decay rates as long as several hundreds of microseconds show that both radiative and nonradiative processes have low efficiencies. An analysis of the dependence of the nonradiative-decay rates on carrier confinement in terms of an escape of carriers from the confined zone by tunnelling through silicon oxide barriers accounts for our experimental results with an average barrier thickness of 3 nm. The same model is extended and explains the luminescence decay shapes and the electroluminescence signal.