Ultra-violet emitters have several applications in the areas of sensing, water purification, and data storage. While the III-Nitride semiconductor system has the band gap region necessary for ultraviolet emission, achieving efficient ultraviolet solid state emitters remains a challenge due to the low p-type conductivity and high contact resistance in wide band gap AlGaN-based ultra-violet light emitters. In this work, we show that efficient interband tunneling can be used for non-equilibrium injection of holes into ultraviolet emitters. Polarization-engineered tunnel junctions were used to enhance tunneling probability by several orders of magnitude over a PN homojunction, leading to highly efficient tunnel injection of holes to ultraviolet light emitters. This demonstration of efficient interband tunneling introduces a new paradigm for design of ultra-violet light emitting diodes and diode lasers, and enables higher efficiency and lower cost ultra-violet emitters.
@article{arxiv.1502.02080,
title = {Interband Tunneling for Hole Injection in III-Nitride Ultra-violet Emitters},
author = {Yuewei Zhang and Sriram Krishnamoorthy and Jared M. Johnson and Fatih Akyol and Andrew Allerman and Michael W. Moseley and Andrew Armstrong and Jinwoo Hwang and Siddharth Rajan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.02080},
year = {2015}
}