Room temperature electroluminescence from multilayer GeSi heterostructures

Details of silicon diodes with Ge/Si multilayer quantum dot heterostructures embedded in the Si p–n junction grown by molecular beam epitaxy emitting in the range of 1.4–1.7 µm at room temperature and continuous injection pumping are discussed. Output power of the light emitting diode reaches 1 µW/cm2 at applied current density of 2 A/cm2. Photoluminescence and transmission electron microscopy show that the origin of intense luminescence is defect free stacked Ge quantum dot array formed inside the structure. It is shown that doping by antimony improves structure quality and increases photoluminescence efficiency at room temperature. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)