Résumé:

GaN/AlGaN polar single quantum wells have attracted particular attention due to their large binding energies and the presence of strong internal electric fields that naturally induce long-lived excitons. In this case, the exciton transport is driven by the potential landscape caused by the local alteration of the built-in electric field, which results from the exciton accumulation at the same point. We study by spatially- and time-resolved PL experiments AlGaN/GaN coupled quantum wells (QW). The active zone of studied sample consists of a 30 nm thick Al0.20Ga0.80N barrier, a 4.4 nm (17 atomic monolayers) GaN QW followed by 1 monolayer of Al0.20Ga0.80N and a 1.6 nm (6 atomic monolayers) GaN QW and 30 nm thick Al0.20Ga0.80N cap layer. By solving Schroedinger-Poisson equation, we illustrate the two regimes of strongly screened electric field and the totally un-screened QW system. We show that the screening of the build-in electric field enhances the electron-hole wave-function overlap and increases the optical recombination energy. In other words, dipoledipole repulsion between excitons raises their potential energy and drastically increases their radiative recombination rate. A blue-shift of 0.3 eV under continues wave, localized excitation and a quasi-continuous red-shift of the emission as excitons are drifted away from the excitation spot up to distances of 90 μm are observed experimentally. Strong LO-phonon replica are also noticed, as a result of the strongly dipolar character of excitons [1]. These replicas follow the same position dependence as the zerophonon line. Using our Schroedinger-Poisson equation solver, we can extract from the measured blue-shift the position-dependent exciton density. Last, we present simulations of the observed transport features, namely the exciton densities and luminescence intensities by solving the nonlinear drift-diffusion equation. We establish that the long-range excitonic transport is mainly dominated by drift caused by repulsive dipole-dipole interaction between excitons in combination with their long lifetimes. [1] S. Kalliakos, X. B. Zhang, T. Taliercio, P. Lefebvre, B. Gil, N. Grandjean, B. Damilano, and J. Massies. Applied Physics Letters 80, 428 (2002).