Effect of reactive ion beam etching on the photoluminescence of CdTe epitaxial layers

Abstract

We demonstrated the effect of reactive ion beam etching ͑RIBE͒ process on the PL properties of CdTe/sapphire metal organic vapor phase epitaxy layers. At optimum conditions, the RIBE attack does not make significant morphological changes but it results in an increase of the concentration of acceptor impurities. This was revealed by an increase of the overall photoluminescence ͑PL͒ intensity and, simultaneously, a decrease of the PL decay time, more important on the low energy side of PL spectrum due to the recombination of carriers in acceptor pairs.