Performance enhancement of an N-polar nitride deep-ultraviolet light-emitting diode with compositionally graded p-AlGaN.

Highly efficient hole injection into a AlGaN quantum well is desirable in nitride deep-ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (DUV LEDs) for high optical performance. In this work, we report the observation of enhanced hole injection in the N-polar AlGaN-based DUV LEDs with compositionally graded p-AlxGa1-xN (x = 0.65-0.75) by simulation and show that the enhanced hole injection leads to the increase of the peak internal quantum efficiency (IQE) and the significant reduction of efficiency droop at high current density. This work might activate researchers to realize the efficient polarization p-type doping of N-polar AlGaN with high Al content and thus to achieve high performance DUV LEDs experimentally.

Performance enhancement of nitrogen-polar GaN-based light-emitting diodes prepared by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition.

Nitrogen-polar (N-polar) III-nitride materials have great potential for application in long-wavelength light-emitting diodes (LEDs). However, the poor quality of N-polar nitride materials hinders the development of N-polar devices. In this work, we report the enhanced performance of N-polar GaN-based LEDs with an optimized InGaN/GaN double quantum well (DQW) structure grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. We improved the quality of the N-polar InGaN/GaN DQWs by elevating the growth temperature and introducing hydrogen as the carrier gas during the growth of the quantum barrier layers. N-polar LEDs prepared based on the optimized InGaN/GaN DQWs show significantly enhanced (by over 90%) external quantum efficiency and a weakened droop effect compared with a reference LED. More importantly, the optimized N-polar DQWs show a significantly longer emission wavelength than Ga-polar DQWs grown at the same QW growth temperature. This work provides a feasible approach to improving the quality of the N-polar InGaN/GaN QW structure, and it will promote the development of N-polar GaN-based long-wavelength light-emitting devices for micro-LED displays.

Accurate Monitoring Platform for the Surface Catalysis of Nanozyme Validated by Surface-Enhanced Raman-Kinetics Model.

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a supersensitive technique for monitoring catalytic reactions. However, building a SERS-kinetics model to investigate catalytic efficiency on the surface or interface of the catalyst remains a great challenge. In the present study, we successfully obtained an excellent semiconducting SERS substrate, reduced MnCo2O4 (R-MnCo2O4) nanotubes, whose favorable SERS sensitivity is mainly related to the promoted interfacial charge transfer caused by the introduction of oxygen vacancies as well as the electromagnetic enhancement effect. Furthermore, the R-MnCo2O4 nanotubes showed a favorable oxidase-like activity toward oxidation with the aid of molecular oxygen. It was also showed the oxidase-like catalytic process could be monitored using the SERS technique. A new SERS-kinetics model to monitor the catalytic efficiency of the oxidase-like reaction was developed, and the results demonstrate that the Vm values measured by the SERS-kinetics method are close to that obtained by the UV-vis approach, while the Km values measured by the SERS-kinetics method are much lower, demonstrating the better affinity between the enzyme and the substrate from SERS results and further confirming the high sensitivity of the SERS-kinetics approach and the actual enzyme-like reaction on the surface of nanozymes, which provides guidance in understanding the kinetics process and catalytic mechanism of natural enzymatic and other artificial enzymatic reactions. This work demonstrated the improved SERS sensitivity of defective semiconductors for the application of enzyme mimicking, providing a new frontier to construct highly sensitive biosensors.

Demonstration of epitaxial growth of strain-relaxed GaN films on graphene/SiC substrates for long wavelength light-emitting diodes.

Strain modulation is crucial for heteroepitaxy such as GaN on foreign substrates. Here, the epitaxy of strain-relaxed GaN films on graphene/SiC substrates by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition is demonstrated. Graphene was directly prepared on SiC substrates by thermal decomposition. Its pre-treatment with nitrogen-plasma can introduce C-N dangling bonds, which provides nucleation sites for subsequent epitaxial growth. The scanning transmission electron microscopy measurements confirm that part of graphene surface was etched by nitrogen-plasma. We study the growth behavior on different areas of graphene surface after pre-treatment, and propose a growth model to explain the epitaxial growth mechanism of GaN films on graphene. Significantly, graphene is found to be effective to reduce the biaxial stress in GaN films and the strain relaxation improves indium-atom incorporation in InGaN/GaN multiple quantum wells (MQWs) active region, which results in the obvious red-shift of light-emitting wavelength of InGaN/GaN MQWs. This work opens up a new way for the fabrication of GaN-based long wavelength light-emitting diodes.

High-Performance Ultraviolet Light-Emitting Diodes Using n-ZnO/p-hBN/p-GaN Contact Heterojunctions.

Effective ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were fabricated by clamping the n-ZnO films on the top of p-hBN/p-GaN/sapphire substrates. An ultraviolet emission originating from ZnO was measured from the diode under a forward bias, the electroluminescence (EL) spectra of which show a peak wavelength of ∼376 nm with a narrow full-width at half maximum of ∼12 nm. Compared with the reference diode fabricated by directly growing n-ZnO on the p-hBN substrates using metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, the proposed diode showed a dramatic increment of the EL intensity; meanwhile, its emission onset lowered down considerably. The improved optical property of the proposed LED is mainly ascribed to suppressing the formation of the BNO-related layer at the n-ZnO/p-hBN interface. The present work provides a simple and feasible approach for developing advanced ZnO-based optoelectronic devices.