Optical and magnetic resonance studies of Be-doped GaN bulk crystals

Low temperature photoluminescence (PL) and optically-detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) at 24 GHz have been performed on a set of Be-doped GaN bulk crystals grown by the high pressure nitrogen solution method. Most notably, these crystals exhibit an intense 2.25 eV “yellow” PL band that is currently of high interest for use as a converter in white light-emitting-diode applications. In addition, the samples investigated in this work are found to emit a broad “violet” PL band of varying intensity with peak energy near 3.16 eV that is shown to be associated with a high concentration of residual Mg acceptor impurities as supported by secondary ion mass spectroscopy measurements. ODMR angular rotation studies obtained on the “yellow” and “violet” emission bands revealed two strong signals in each case and helped to provide information on the nature of these recombination processes. One feature, common to the ODMR of each PL band, has Zeeman splitting g-values of ~1.95 and is ascribed to residual Si and O shallow donor impurities. The second ODMR signal observed on the 2.25 eV “yellow” PL exhibits nearly isotropic g-values of ~2.0 characteristic of deep centers in GaN and is tentatively associated with Be-related deep acceptors. In contrast, the second ODMR feature found on the 3.16 eV “violet” PL has a larger degree of anisotropy with g║~2.1 and g⊥~2.0 and are similar to the g-values assigned previously to Mg shallow acceptors from ODMR studies of highly Mg-doped GaN heteroepitaxial layers with large degree (≥10%) of compensation.