Zhe Zhuang

Large-scale fabrication and luminescence properties of GaN nanostructures by a soft UV-curing nanoimprint lithography

GaN nanorods with a period of 400 nm and diameter of 200 nm, and nano-gratings with a period of 400 nm and gap width of 100 nm are fabricated on wafers by a soft UV-curing nanoimprint lithography. These nanostructures show high periodicity and good morphology. The photoluminescence (PL) spectra exhibit that the integral PL intensity of GaN nanorods is enhanced as much as 2.5 times, compared to that of as-grown GaN films. According to finite-difference time-domain simulations and cathodoluminescence mappings, it is concluded that the enhancement for nanorods is due to the improvements of both spontaneous emission rate and light extraction efficiency caused by periodic GaN structures on the surface. By identifying the Raman shift of E1(TO) and E2(H) modes of GaN films with nano-gratings and nanorods, the normal-plane strain ε(zz) is determined. The PL emission energy is found to be proportional to the ε(zz), whose linear proportionality factor is calculated to be -27 meV GPa(-1).

Significant improvements in InGaN/GaN nano-photoelectrodes for hydrogen generation by structure and polarization optimization.

The photoelectrodes based on III-nitride semiconductors with high energy conversion efficiency especially for those self-driven ones are greatly desirable for hydrogen generation. In this study, highly ordered InGaN/GaN multiple-quantum-well nanorod-based photoelectrodes have been fabricated by a soft UV-curing nano-imprint lithography and a top-down etching technique, which improve the incident photon conversion efficiency (IPCE) from 16% (planar structure) to 42% (@ wavelength = 400 nm). More significantly, the turn-on voltage is reduced low to −0.6 V, which indicates the possibility of achieving self-driven. Furthermore, SiO2/Si3N4 dielectric distributed Bragg reflectors are employed to further improve the IPCE up to 60%. And the photocurrent (@ 1.1 V) is enhanced from 0.37 mA/cm2 (original planar structure) to 1.5 mA/cm2. These improvements may accelerate the possible applications for hydrogen generation with high energy-efficiency.

A New Strategy of Lithography Based on Phase Separation of Polymer Blends

Herein, we propose a new strategy of maskless lithographic approach to fabricate micro/nano-porous structures by phase separation of polystyrene (PS)/Polyethylene glycol (PEG) immiscible polymer blend. Its simple process only involves a spin coating of polymer blend followed by a development with deionized water rinse to remove PEG moiety, which provides an extremely facile, low-cost, easily accessible nanofabrication method to obtain the porous structures with wafer-scale. By controlling the weight ratio of PS/PEG polymer blend, its concentration and the spin-coating speed, the structural parameters of the porous nanostructure could be effectively tuned. These micro/nano porous structures could be converted into versatile functional nanostructures in combination with follow-up conventional chemical and physical nanofabrication techniques. As demonstrations of perceived potential applications using our developed phase separation lithography, we fabricate wafer-scale pure dielectric (silicon)-based two-dimensional nanostructures with high broadband absorption on silicon wafers due to their great light trapping ability, which could be expected for promising applications in the fields of photovoltaic devices and thermal emitters with very good performances, and Ag nanodot arrays which possess a surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) enhancement factor up to 1.64 × 108 with high uniformity across over an entire wafer.

Great enhancement in the excitonic recombination and light extraction of highly ordered InGaN/GaN elliptic nanorod arrays on a wafer scale.

A series of highly ordered c-plane InGaN/GaN elliptic nanorod (NR) arrays were fabricated by our developed soft UV-curing nanoimprint lithography on a wafer. The photoluminescence (PL) integral intensities of NR samples show a remarkable enhancement by a factor of up to two orders of magnitude compared with their corresponding as-grown samples at room temperature. The radiative recombination in NR samples is found to be greatly enhanced due to not only the suppressed non-radiative recombination but also the strain relaxation and optical waveguide effects. It is demonstrated that elliptic NR arrays improve the light extraction greatly and have polarized emission, both of which possibly result from the broken structure symmetry. Green NR light-emitting diodes have been finally realized, with good current-voltage performance and uniform luminescence.

Investigation of surface plasmon coupling with the quantum well for reducing efficiency droop in GaN-based light emitting diodes

The spontaneous emission rate into Surface Plasmon Polariton (SPP) mode for the InGaN/GaN quantum well (QW) with SP coupling is presented taking into account the electron and hole band structures, the photon density of states, and evanescent fields of SPP. The optical properties of SP-enhanced InGaN QW structure with different QW layer number are investigated in detail by using the formula. It is observed that the energy of electron-hole pairs in the InGaN QW can be efficiently transferred into the SPP modes which will induce the significantly enhancement of the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of SP-enhanced light emitting diodes (LEDs), especially for the original IQE in the range of 6%–25%. Furthermore, the distribution of electron and hole densities in each well layer can evidently affect the Purcell enhancement factor due to the distance dependence of the intensity of SP-QW coupling. The numerical results also indicate that the SP-enhanced LED can suppress the efficiency droop effect as long as the ...

Fabrication of wafer-scale nanopatterned sapphire substrate by hybrid nanoimprint lithography

A hybrid nanoimprint soft lithography (HNSL) technique was used to fabricate nanopatterned sapphire substrates (NPSSs) for light-emitting diodes (LEDs). HNSL combines the high resolution of nanoimprint lithography (NIL) and the conformal contact of soft lithography. The key component of HNSL is the hybrid mold, which consists of rigid nanopatterns with an anti-adhesion coating on an elastic poly(dimethylsiloxane) support. The mold was used to fabricate nanopatterns on a 2-in. sapphire substrate through a soft UV-NIL system with a double-layer resist, a top UV-curable layer, and an underlying PMMA layer. Nickel dot arrays were formed from the imprinted patterns through a lift-off process and used as the etching mask during the sapphire etching process due to nickels high etching resistance. A wafer-scale circular-truncated-cone shaped NPSS was achieved by chlorine-based inductively coupled plasma etching. Typical blue LEDs with emission wavelengths of 452 nm were grown by metal-organic chemical vapor depo...

Investigation of surface-plasmon coupled red light emitting InGaN/GaN multi-quantum well with Ag nanostructures coated on GaN surface

Surface-plasmon (SP) coupled red light emitting InGaN/GaN multiple quantum well (MQW) structure is fabricated and investigated. The centre wavelength of 5-period InGaN/GaN MQW structure is about 620 nm. The intensity of photoluminescence (PL) for InGaN QW with naked Ag nano-structures (NS) is only slightly increased due to the oxidation of Ag NS as compared to that for the InGaN QW. However, InGaN QW with Ag NS/SiO2 structure can evidently enhance the emission efficiency due to the elimination of surface oxide layer of Ag NS. With increasing the laser excitation power, the PL intensity is enhanced by 25%–53% as compared to that for the SiO2 coating InGaN QW. The steady-state electric field distribution obtained by the three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method is different for both structures. The proportion of the field distributed in the Ag NS for the GaN/Ag NS/SiO2 structure is smaller as compared to that for the GaN/naked Ag NS structure. As a result, the energy loss of localized SP modes ...

Effect of the band structure of InGaN/GaN quantum well on the surface plasmon enhanced light-emitting diodes

The spontaneous emission (SE) of InGaN/GaN quantum well (QW) structure with silver(Ag) coated on the n-GaN layer has been investigated by using six-by-six K-P method taking into account the electron-hole band structures, the photon density of states of surface plasmon polariton (SPP), and the evanescent fields of SPP. The SE into SPP mode can be remarkably enhanced due to the increase of electron-hole pairs near the Ag by modulating the InGaN/GaN QW structure or increasing the carrier injection. However, the ratio between the total SE rates into SPP mode and free space will approach to saturation or slightly decrease for the optimized structures with various distances between Ag film and QW layer at a high injection carrier density. Furthermore, the Ga-face QW structure has a higher SE rate than the N-face QW structure due to the overlap region of electron-hole pairs nearer to the Ag film.

Bloch surface plasmon enhanced blue emission from InGaN/GaN light-emitting diode structures with Al-coated GaN nanorods

InGaN/GaN light-emitting diode structures with Al-coated GaN nanorods were fabricated by using soft ultraviolet nanoimprint lithography. The intensity of light emission was found to be greatly enhanced due to the strong near-fields confined at the interface of Al/GaN and extended to the multiple quantum wells (MQWs) active region. The dynamics of carrier recombination and plasmon-enhanced Raman scattering were also investigated, providing a progressive view on the effective energy transfer between MQWs and surface plasmons.

Asymmetric tunneling model of forward leakage current in GaN/InGaN light emitting diodes

Through investigating the temperature dependent current-voltage (T-I-V) properties of GaN based blue and green LEDs in this study, we propose an asymmetric tunneling model to understand the leakage current below turn-on voltage (V < 3.2 V): At the forward bias within 1.5 V ∼ 2.1 V (region 1), the leakage current is main attributed to electrons tunneling from the conduction band of n-type GaN layer to the valence band of p-type GaN layer via defect states in space-charge region (SCR); While, at the forward bias within 2 V ∼ 2.4 V (region 2), heavy holes tunneling gradually becomes dominant at low temperature (T < 200K) as long as they can overcome the energy barrier height. The tunneling barrier for heavy holes is estimated to be lower than that for electrons, indicating the heavy holes might only tunnel to the defect states. This asymmetric tunneling model shows a novel carrier transport process, which provides better understanding of the leakage characteristics and is vital for future device improvements.