Optical Study of p-Doping in GaAs Nanowires for Low-Threshold and High-Yield Lasing.

Alanis, Juan Arturo; Lysevych, Mykhaylo; Burgess, Tim; Saxena, Dhruv; Mokkapati, Sudha; Skalsky, Stefan; Tang, Xiaoyan; Mitchell, Peter et al. · Nano Lett · 2019

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Semiconductor nanowires suffer from significant non-radiative surface recombination; however, heavy p-type doping has proven to be a viable option to increase the radiative recombination rate and, hence, quantum efficiency of emission, allowing the demonstration of room-temperature lasing. Using a large-scale optical technique, we have studied Zn-doped GaAs nanowires to understand and quantify the effect of doping on growth and lasing properties. We measure the non-radiative recombination rate ( k<sub>nr</sub>) to be (0.14 ± 0.04) ps<sup>-1</sup> by modeling the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) as a function of doping level. By applying a correlative method, we identify doping and nanowire length as key controllable parameters determining lasing behavior, with reliable room-temperature lasing occurring for p ≳ 3 × 10<sup>18</sup> cm<sup>-3</sup> and lengths of ≳4 μm. We report a best-in-class core-only near-infrared nanowire lasing threshold of ∼10 μJ cm<sup>-2</sup>, and using a data-led filtering step, we present a method to simply identify subsets of nanowires with over 90% lasing yield.