Photoluminescence and photoluminescence excitation spectra, vertical transport of photoexcited charge carriers and excitons and Raman scattering by optical phonons have been studied for the first time in lowstrained superlattices CdSe/CdMgSe grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on InAs substrates. The vertical transport was studied by purely optical means involving an enlarged quantum well built into the superlattice. The enlarged quantum well served as a sink for the photoexcited carriers and excitons that have tunnelled through the superlattice. The measurements conducted in temperature range 2-150 K and also under in-plane strong magnetic fields show that vertical transport occurs mainly by free heavy-hole excitons but in superlattices with 5.9 nm and 7.3 nm periods it is not of the Bloch type. A comparison of the calculated energies of the interband transitions with the experimental data provides the valence-band ofsett in the range 0.4-0.5. The Raman spectra indicate a two-mode behavior of the optical phonons in CdMgSe barriers.1 Introduction Photoluminescence (PL) and photoluminescence excitation (PLE) spectra, vertical transport of charge carriers and excitons, and Raman scattering in CdSe/CdMgSe superlattices (SLs) were studied in this work for the first time. To our knowledge, the optical and structural properties of type I SLs with CdSe quantum wells (QWs) have not been studied previously because of the absence of such structures. It is known that in CdSe/ZnSe heterostructures CdSe depositions of monolayer width transform during growth into flat CdZnSe islands due to the existence of a large lattice mismatch (7%). We have previously studied the PL and Raman scattering in such quantum-disc structures [1]. PL of type II quantum wells CdSe/ZnTe grown on a GaAs substrate and ZnTe buffer layer was studied in [2]. It has been shown recently that type I low-strained CdSe/CdMgSe quantum wells can be grown by molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) on InAs substrates [3]. It has been suggested and experimentally verified that these materials can be a key element of a new type of III-V/II-VI hybrid laser diode for the middleinfrared (IR) spectral region [4]. Thus, it is of both academic and practical interest to study the optical properties of the new CdMgSe alloys and CdSe/CdMgSe superlattices grown on InAs substrates and, in particular, the vertical transport of charge carriers and excitons across such superlattices along the growth axis. In this study, we used a purely optical method to examine the vertical transport of charge carriers and excitons that involved a comparison of the intensities of the PL from the superlattice and from the enlarged quantum well (EW), which was built into the superlattice. This method was suggested for the first time in [5].