Low-temperature photoluminescence (PL) and temperature-dependent Hall-effect (T-Hall) measurements were carried out in undoped and Ga-doped ZnO thin films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. As the carrier concentration increases from 1.8×1018 to 1.8×1020 cm−3, the dominant PL line at 9 K changes from I1 (3.368–3.371 eV) to IDA (3.317–3.321 eV), and finally to I8 (3.359 eV). The dominance of I1, due to ionized-donor bound excitons, is unexpected in n-type samples but is shown to be consistent with the T-Hall results. We also show that IDA has characteristics of a donor-acceptor-pair transition, and use a detailed, quantitative analysis to argue that it arises from GaZn donors paired with Zn-vacancy (VZn) acceptors. In this analysis, the GaZn0/+ energy is well-known from two-electron satellite transitions, and the VZn0/− energy is taken from a recent theoretical calculation.
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Copyright © 2009, American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 94.7, and may be found at http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v94/i7/p072101_s1