Discovery of classes among deep level centers in gallium arsenide

By using thermal electron emission data from the literature in addition to own measured results for totally 40 data sets of deep level centers in GaAs, we demonstrate that they can be divided into two different classes. We find that all the centers of this population, except one, can be interpreted as following the Meyer-Neldel rule. Under this condition, the magnitude of the matrix element determining their capture cross section is the most probable partitioning mechanism.