Impact of doping on carrier recombination and stimulated emission in highly excited GaN:Mg

Light-induced transient grating and photoluminescence measurements were employed for carrier recombination studies in variously Mg doped GaN layers. Carrier lifetime and ambipolar diffusion coefficient were found to decrease with doping from 210 to 20 ps and from 2.0 to 0.9 cm2/s,respectively, which proved the degradation of electrical quality of the layers. A threshold of stimulated emission was found to depend non-monotonously on doping and had the lowest value of 0.19 mJ/cm2 in the most doped layer. This dependence was explained in terms of degeneracy of the hole system.