Band alignments and photon-induced carrier transfer from wetting layers to Ge islands grown on Si(001)

Temperature- and excitation-power-dependent photoluminescence measurements were carried out for the multilayer structure of Ge islands grown on a Si(001) substrate by gas-source molecular-beam epitaxy. When the excitation power increases from 10 to 400 mW, the photoluminescence peak from the Ge islands showed a large linear blueshift of 34 meV while that of the wetting layers did not change much. These two different power dependences are explained in terms of type-II and type-I band alignments for the islands and the wetting layers, respectively. When the sample temperature increased from 8 to 20 K, an anomalous increase of photoluminescence intensity for islands was accompanied by a rapid decrease of that from the wetting layers, implying that a large portion of photon-induced carriers in the wetting layer was transfered to the neighboring islands and the Si layer, respectively, thus resulting in an increase of photoluminescence intensity of the islands. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.