Trends in the electronic structure of dilute nitride alloys

The band-anticrossing (BAC) model has been widely applied to analyse the electronic structure of dilute nitride III-V-N alloys such as GaN xAs1-x. The BAC model describes the strong band gap bowing observed at low N composition in GaNxAs1- x in terms of an interaction between the GaAs host matrix conduction band edge and a higher lying band of localized N resonant states. In practice, replacing As by N introduces a range of N-related defect levels, associated with isolated N atoms, N-N pairs and larger clusters of N atoms. We show that the effect of such defect levels on the alloy conduction band structure is strongly dependent on the relative energy of the defect levels and the host conduction band edge. We first consider GaNxAs1-x, where we show that the unexpectedly large electron effective mass and gyromagnetic ratio, and their non-monotonic variation with x, are due to hybridization between the conduction band edge and specific nitrogen states close to the band edge. The N-related defect levels lie below the conduction band edge in GaN xP1-x. We must therefore explicitly treat the interaction between the higher lying GaP host Γ conduction band minimum and defect states associated with a random distribution of N atoms in order to obtain a good description of the lowest conduction states in disordered GaPN alloys. Turning to other alloys, N-related defect levels should generally lie well above the conduction band minimum in InNSb, with the band dispersion of InNSb then well described by a two-level BAC model. Both InP and InAs are intermediate between InSb and GaAs. By contrast, we calculate that N-related defect levels lie close to the conduction band minimum in GaNSb, and will therefore strongly perturb the lowest conduction states in this alloy. Overall, we conclude that the BAC model provides a good qualitative explanation of the electronic properties of dilute nitride alloys, but that it is in many cases necessary to include the details of the distribution of N-related defect levels to obtain a quantitative understanding of the conduction band structure in dilute nitride alloys. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.