Optical investigations of GaAsN in high magnetic fields

Introducing a few hundredths of a percent of nitrogen into a GaAs-based semiconductor leads to dramatic changes of the electronic and optical properties of the original material system. This can be used in order to intentionally tune the semiconductors characteristics. In particular the bandgap of semiconductors like GaAs and InGaAs, can be strongly reduced by slight nitrogen incorporation, which is attractive for applications, in particular for detectors or light sources.

Even though a lot of effort has been made on the investigation of the effective mass in GaAsN, it is rather challenging to describe the and stucture and in particular the effective mass of this system. We investigate a series of GaAsN samples and make use of high magnetic fields in combination with THz radiation from a free-electron laser, which provides a unique approach in order to find the source of previous inconsistencies. Cyclotron resonance spectroscopy is probably the most direct way to measure the effective mass, but has never been applied before to GaAsN bulk. We compare the results of this method with those of magneto-photoluminescence (PL), which is more commonly applied to dilute nitrides.

Our cyclotron resonance spectroscopy results indicate that the effective mass is not very much affected by the nitrogen doping, in contrast to previous reports (e.g. [1–4]) based on magneto-PL. In our PL investigations in magnetic fields up to 61 T, the observed blueshift of the PL spectrum indicates a similar increase of the effective mass, as reported before in e.g. [1–4]. We will discuss the significance of the particular method and argue that some assumptions have to be reconsidered.