Method of Determining the Existence of Quasicontinuous Trap Distributions from Luminescence

It is shown that the usual analysis of luminescence decay is incapable of distinguishing between the very different physical situations of electron liberation from a single trap level, followed by recombination with kinetic order > 1, and liberation from a quasicontinuous distribution, followed by recombination involving first-order kinetics. However, an exact solution for the case of a uniform distribution indicates departures from the hyperbolic decay curve which suggest a method of establishing the existence of a trap distribution, even when this is not uniform.