Photo-induced changes of the surface band bending in GaN: Influence of growth technique, doping and polarity

In this work, we use conductance and contact potential difference photo-transient data to study the influence of the growth technique, doping, and crystal polarity on the kinetics of photo-generated charges in GaN. We found that the processes, and corresponding time scales, involved in the decay of charge carriers generated at and close to the GaN surface via photo-excitation are notably independent of the growth technique, doping (n- and p-types), and also crystal polarity. Hence, the transfer of photo-generated charges from band states back to surface states proceeds always by hopping via shallow defect states in the space-charge region (SCR) close to the surface. Concerning the charge carrier photo-generation kinetics, we observe considerable differences between samples grown with different techniques. While for GaN grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, the accumulation of photo-conduction electrons results mainly from a combined trapping-hopping process (slow), where photo-generated electrons hop via shallow defect states to the conduction band (CB), in hydride vapor phase epitaxy and molecular beam epitaxy materials, a faster direct process involving electron transfer via CB states is also present. The time scales of both processes are quite insensitive to the doping level and crystal polarity. However, these processes become irrelevant for very high doping levels (both n- and p-types), where the width of the SCR is much smaller than the photon penetration depth, and therefore, most charge carriers are generated outside the SCR.