Band alignments and photon-induced carrier transfer from wetting layers to Ge islands grown on Si(001)

Abstract

Temperature- and excitation-power-dependent photoluminescence measurements were carried out for the multilayer structure of Ge islands grown on a Si(001) substrate by gas-source molecular-beam epitaxy. When the excitation power increases from 10 to 400 mW, the photoluminescence peak from the Ge islands showed a large linear blueshift of 34 meV while that of the wetting layers did not change much. These two different power dependences are explained in terms of type-II and type-I band alignments for the islands and the wetting layers, respectively. When the sample temperature increased from 8 to 20 K, an anomalous increase of photoluminescence intensity for islands was accompanied by a rapid decrease of that from the wetting layers, implying that a large portion of photon-induced carriers in the wetting layer was transfered to the neighboring islands and the Si layer, respectively, thus resulting in an increase of photoluminescence intensity of the islands.