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Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells

In this paper, ab initio calculations are used to determine polarization difference in zinc blende (ZB), hexagonal (H) and wurtzite (WZ) AlN-GaN and GaN-InN superlattices. It is shown that a polarization difference exists between WZ nitride compounds, while for H and ZB lattices the results are cons...

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Autores principales: Ahmad, Ashfaq, Strak, Pawel, Koronski, Kamil, Kempisty, Pawel, Sakowski, Konrad, Piechota, Jacek, Grzegory, Izabella, Wierzbicka, Aleksandra, Kryvyi, Serhii, Monroy, Eva, Kaminska, Agata, Krukowski, Stanislaw
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8433669/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34501025
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ma14174935
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author Ahmad, Ashfaq
Strak, Pawel
Koronski, Kamil
Kempisty, Pawel
Sakowski, Konrad
Piechota, Jacek
Grzegory, Izabella
Wierzbicka, Aleksandra
Kryvyi, Serhii
Monroy, Eva
Kaminska, Agata
Krukowski, Stanislaw
author_facet Ahmad, Ashfaq
Strak, Pawel
Koronski, Kamil
Kempisty, Pawel
Sakowski, Konrad
Piechota, Jacek
Grzegory, Izabella
Wierzbicka, Aleksandra
Kryvyi, Serhii
Monroy, Eva
Kaminska, Agata
Krukowski, Stanislaw
author_sort Ahmad, Ashfaq
collection PubMed
description In this paper, ab initio calculations are used to determine polarization difference in zinc blende (ZB), hexagonal (H) and wurtzite (WZ) AlN-GaN and GaN-InN superlattices. It is shown that a polarization difference exists between WZ nitride compounds, while for H and ZB lattices the results are consistent with zero polarization difference. It is therefore proven that the difference in Berry phase spontaneous polarization for bulk nitrides (AlN, GaN and InN) obtained by Bernardini et al. and Dreyer et al. was not caused by the different reference phase. These models provided absolute values of the polarization that differed by more than one order of magnitude for the same material, but they provided similar polarization differences between binary compounds, which agree also with our ab initio calculations. In multi-quantum wells (MQWs), the electric fields are generated by the well-barrier polarization difference; hence, the calculated electric fields are similar for the three models, both for GaN/AlN and InN/GaN structures. Including piezoelectric effect, which can account for 50% of the total polarization difference, these theoretical data are in satisfactory agreement with photoluminescence measurements in GaN/AlN MQWs. Therefore, the three models considered above are equivalent in the treatment of III-nitride MQWs and can be equally used for the description of the electric properties of active layers in nitride-based optoelectronic devices.
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spelling pubmed-84336692021-09-12 Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells Ahmad, Ashfaq Strak, Pawel Koronski, Kamil Kempisty, Pawel Sakowski, Konrad Piechota, Jacek Grzegory, Izabella Wierzbicka, Aleksandra Kryvyi, Serhii Monroy, Eva Kaminska, Agata Krukowski, Stanislaw Materials (Basel) Article In this paper, ab initio calculations are used to determine polarization difference in zinc blende (ZB), hexagonal (H) and wurtzite (WZ) AlN-GaN and GaN-InN superlattices. It is shown that a polarization difference exists between WZ nitride compounds, while for H and ZB lattices the results are consistent with zero polarization difference. It is therefore proven that the difference in Berry phase spontaneous polarization for bulk nitrides (AlN, GaN and InN) obtained by Bernardini et al. and Dreyer et al. was not caused by the different reference phase. These models provided absolute values of the polarization that differed by more than one order of magnitude for the same material, but they provided similar polarization differences between binary compounds, which agree also with our ab initio calculations. In multi-quantum wells (MQWs), the electric fields are generated by the well-barrier polarization difference; hence, the calculated electric fields are similar for the three models, both for GaN/AlN and InN/GaN structures. Including piezoelectric effect, which can account for 50% of the total polarization difference, these theoretical data are in satisfactory agreement with photoluminescence measurements in GaN/AlN MQWs. Therefore, the three models considered above are equivalent in the treatment of III-nitride MQWs and can be equally used for the description of the electric properties of active layers in nitride-based optoelectronic devices. MDPI 2021-08-30 /pmc/articles/PMC8433669/ /pubmed/34501025 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ma14174935 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Ahmad, Ashfaq
Strak, Pawel
Koronski, Kamil
Kempisty, Pawel
Sakowski, Konrad
Piechota, Jacek
Grzegory, Izabella
Wierzbicka, Aleksandra
Kryvyi, Serhii
Monroy, Eva
Kaminska, Agata
Krukowski, Stanislaw
Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells
title Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells
title_full Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells
title_fullStr Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells
title_full_unstemmed Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells
title_short Critical Evaluation of Various Spontaneous Polarization Models and Induced Electric Fields in III-Nitride Multi-Quantum Wells
title_sort critical evaluation of various spontaneous polarization models and induced electric fields in iii-nitride multi-quantum wells
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8433669/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34501025
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ma14174935
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