Suppression of non-radiative surface recombination by N incorporation in GaAs/GaNAs core/shell nanowires

III-V semiconductor nanowires (NWs) such as GaAs NWs form an interesting artificial materials system promising for applications in advanced optoelectronic and photonic devices, thanks to the advantages offered by the 1D architecture and the possibility to combine it with the main-stream silicon technology. Alloying of GaAs with nitrogen can further enhance performance and extend device functionality via band-structure and lattice engineering. However, due to a large surface-to-volume ratio, III-V NWs suffer from severe non-radiative carrier recombination at/near NWs surfaces that significantly degrades optical quality. Here we show that increasing nitrogen composition in novel GaAs/GaNAs core/shell NWs can strongly suppress the detrimental surface recombination. This conclusion is based on our experimental finding that lifetimes of photo-generated free excitons and free carriers increase with increasing N composition, as revealed from our time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) studies. This is accompanied by a sizable enhancement in the PL intensity of the GaAs/GaNAs core/shell NWs at room temperature. The observed N-induced suppression of the surface recombination is concluded to be a result of an N-induced modification of the surface states that are responsible for the nonradiative recombination. Our results, therefore, demonstrate the great potential of incorporating GaNAs in III-V NWs to achieve efficient nano-scale light emitters.