Luminescence from point defects in widebandgap, direct-gap semiconductors

In this chapter, phenomenological theories of PL are presented and compared with experimental results on PL from wide-bandgap semiconductors, primarily GaN. Types of electron transitions leading to PL are defined in Section 2.2. The rate equations model and the configuration-coordinate (CC) model are presented in Section 2.3. In particular, we will show how to estimate the concentrations of defects and reveal their important characteristics such as the energy levels, carrier capture coefficients, electron-phonon coupling strength, excited states.