Temporal isolation of surface-acoustic-wave-driven luminescence from a lateral p-n junction using pulsed techniques

The authors report surface-acoustic-wave-driven luminescence from a lateral p-n junction formed by molecular-beam epitaxy regrowth of a modulation doped GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well on a patterned GaAs substrate. Pulsed techniques are used to isolate the surface-acoustic-wave-driven emission from any emission due to pick-up of the free-space electromagnetic wave. The luminescence provides a fast probe of the signals arriving at the p-n junction allowing the response of the junction to the surface-acoustic-wave to be studied in the time domain. Oscillations in the surface-acoustic-wave-driven component of the light intensity are resolved at the resonant frequency of the transducer, suggesting that the surface-acoustic-wave is transporting electrons across the junction in packets.