Compact solid-state lamps based on light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are of current technological interest as an alternative to conventional light bulbs. The brightest LEDs available so far emit red light and exhibit higher luminous efficiency than fluorescent lamps. If this luminous efficiency could be transferred to white LEDs, power consumption would be dramatically reduced, with great economic and ecological consequences. But the luminous efficiency of existing white LEDs is still very low, owing to the presence of electrostatic fields within the active layers. These fields are generated by the spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization along the [0001] axis of hexagonal group-III nitrides--the commonly used materials for light generation. Unfortunately, as this crystallographic orientation corresponds to the natural growth direction of these materials deposited on currently available substrates. Here we demonstrate that the epitaxial growth of GaN/(Al,Ga)N on tetragonal LiAlO2 in a non-polar direction allows the fabrication of structures free of electrostatic fields, resulting in an improved quantum efficiency. We expect that this approach will pave the way towards highly efficient white LEDs.

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Using infrared transmission and Raman spectroscopy, we have studied the optical phonon modes of GaN layers grown on GaAs(001) substrates by molecular beam epitaxy. The crystal structure of the GaN layers ranges from predominantly wurtzite to predominantly zincblende depending on the growth conditions. The transverse and longitudinal optical phonons in cubic GaN are found to be at 552 and 739 cm−1, respectively. These frequencies are slightly shifted with respect to the corresponding A1 and E1 phonon modes in hexagonal GaN. The frequency shifts, together with Raman scattering selection rules, can be used for identifying the phase composition of GaN. A more distinct fingerprint of the hexagonal phase is provided by the occurrence of the E2 phonon modes that are spectrally separated from optical phonon modes in the cubic phase and thus uniquely related to the hexagonal phase.

Polarization-sensitive photodetectors for the ultraviolet spectral range based on M-plane GaN films grown on LiAlO 2 substrates have been fabricated and characterized. These detectors exploit the dichroic properties of strained, M-plane GaN films. For a 400-nm-thick film, a maximum contrast of 7.25 between the detection of light polarized perpendicular and parallel to the c-axis is reached at 363 nm. Considerations for the detector design show that thin strained M-plane GaN films will enhance the polarization-sensitive bandwidth, while the maximum contrast can be obtained for relaxed thick films under weak signal detection conditions.

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