Abstract
Room temperature photomodulated reflectance (PR), Photoluminescence (PL) and double crystal x-ray diffraction (DCXRD) measurements have been performed on a series of tensilely strained InxGa1-xAs (0.316 ≤ x ≤ 0.533) multiple quantum well (QW) structures, with In0.80Ga0.20As0.43P0.57 barriers. The DCXRD measurements provided accurate information on composition, strain and layer thickness, while PR was used to determine the energies of the full manifold of allowed and forbidden critical point interband QW transitions. A three-band effective mass formalism was used to model the QW transitions to derive structural information on each sample. The energies of the ground-state QW transitions, H11 and L11, were found to increase with tensile strain, becoming degenerate near 0.36% tensile strain. Room temperature PR and conventional reflectance (R) measurement have been performed on two I.R. emitting InGaAs/GaAs/A1As vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) structures. The R measurements were modelled using a transfer matrix formalism to determine errors in the growth fluxes. A new PR lineshape model has been developed based on energy dependent Seraphin coefficients, to describe the cavity mode interaction with a confined-state QW transition. The model is demonstrated on a set of PR spectra, and used in a novel way to derive the Deltaepsilon2 spectrum of the QW layers directly. The results are compared with those taken of the QW layers directly after removing the top Bragg stack reflector. Whilst the QW layers in one sample were found to be close to nominal, the in composition of QW in the other sample was found to depart significantly from the nominal 23%, and was found to be 28%. Room temperature and ~ 80K PR measurements were performed on three InAs/GaAs self-assembled quantum dot (QD) structures: a sample with a single layer of QDs, and two with two layers. The PR revealed five equally spaced confined-state QD transitions, at both 80K and room temperature, with ~ 54 meV separation. The behaviour of the QD1 transition as a function of temperature was investigated and an anomalous increase in linewidth was observed on cooling. Annealing of one of the samples produced a strong blue shift (~ 250 meV) and narrowing of the QD transitions.