Confocal photoluminescence investigation to identify basal stacking fault’s role in the optical properties of semi-polar InGaN/GaN lighting emitting diodes

High spatial-resolution confocal photoluminescence (PL) measurements have been performed on a series of semi-polar (11–22) InGaN light emitting diodes (LEDs) with emission wavelengths up to yellow. These LED samples have been grown on our high crystal quality semi-polar GaN templates which feature periodically distributed basal stacking faults (BSFs), which facilitates the study of the influence of BSFs on their optical performance. Scanning confocal PL measurements have been performed across BSFs regions and BSF-free regions. For the blue LED, both the emission intensity and the emission wavelength exhibit a periodic behavior, matching the periodic distribution of BSFs. Furthermore, the BSF regions show a longer emission wavelength and a reduced emission intensity compared with the BSF-free regions. However, with increasing indium content, this periodic behavior in both emission intensity and emission wavelength becomes weaker and weaker. When the indium content (and correspondingly, wavelength) increases up to achieve yellow emission, only random fluctuations have been observed. It is worth highlighting that the influence of BSFs on the optical properties of semi-polar InGaN LEDs is different from the role of dislocations which normally act as non-radiative recombination centers.