Thermal quenching of luminescence in erbium doped semiconductors

The nature of the temperature dependence of luminescence intensity from Er+ ions in GaInAsP, Si, InP, GaAs, AlGaAs, ZnTe, as observed by Favennecet al [1] has been examined in terms of a double exponential model. The smaller activation energy is found to be 58–100 meV, characteristic of a localized energy barrier at the Er+ centre while the higher activation energy is approximately 0.8Eg attributed to an Auger non-radiative process of carrier excitation into bands. This model has been found to describe the observed temperature dependences with reasonably good agreement.