Photoluminescence and reflectance spectroscopy of excitonic transitions in high-quality homoepitaxial GaN films

Abstract

We report on highly resolved photoluminescence (PL) and reflectance (RF) spectra of a homoepitaxial GaN layer grown by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy. This sample exhibits narrow linewidths of several PL emission peaks, down to $\ensuremath{\approx}100\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{eV}$ full width at half maximum for some bound exciton transitions. As a consequence, we have detected new PL features as, e.g., a fivefold fine structure of the donor-bound exciton line at $\ensuremath{\approx}3.471\mathrm{eV},$ and other known PL transitions could be determined with high precision. In RF measurements, the extraordinary quality of the epitaxial layer allowed observation of weakly damped excitonic ground-state transitions and of narrow excited exciton transitions with high signal-to-noise ratio.