We report the influence of (NH4)2S and NH4OH surface treatments prior to SiO2 capping and subsequent rapid thermal annealing, on optical properties of GaInAsN/GaAs quantum-well (QW) structures. We observed an increase in QW photoluminescence (PL) emission for the (NH4)2S treated samples as compared to the untreated sample. After annealing, also the NH4OH treated sample showed significant improvement in PL. The treatments were also found to decrease the In out-diffusion and reduce the blueshift upon annealing. The PL results are discussed with x-ray diffraction and x-ray photoemission data from SiO2/GaAs, in particular, with changes found in Ga 3d spectra.
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