Unlike non-polar semiconductors such as silicon, the broken inversion symmetry of the wide-bandgap semiconductor gallium nitride (GaN) leads to a large electronic polarization along a unique crystal axis¹. This makes the two surfaces of the semiconductor wafer perpendicular to the polar axis substantially different in their physical and chemical properties². In the past three decades, the cation (gallium) face of GaN has been used for photonic devices such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and lasers^3,4,5. Although the cation face has also been predominantly used for electronic devices, the anion (nitrogen) face has recently shown promise for high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) owing to favourable polarization discontinuities⁶. In this work, we introduce dualtronics, showing that it is possible to make photonic devices on the cation face and electronic devices on the anion face of the same semiconductor wafer. This opens the possibility for making use of both faces of polar semiconductors in a single structure, in which electronic, photonic and acoustic properties can be implemented on opposite faces of the same wafer, markedly enhancing the functional capabilities of this revolutionary semiconductor family.

Nitride-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are well known to suffer from a high built-in electric field in the quantum wells (QWs). In this paper we determined to what extent the electric field is screened by injected current. In our approach we used high pressure to study this evolution. In LEDs with a narrow QW (2.6 nm) we found that even at a high injection current a large portion of built-in field remains. In LEDs with very wide QWs (15 and 25 nm) the electric field is fully screened even at the lowest currents. Furthermore, we examined LEDs with a tunnel junction in two locations – above and below the active region. This allowed us to study the cases of parallel and antiparallel fields in the well and in the barriers.

The design of the active region is one of the most crucial problems to address in light emitting devices (LEDs) based on III-nitride, due to the spatial separation of carriers by the built-in polarization. Here, we studied radiative transitions in InGaN-based LEDs with various quantum well (QW) thicknesses—2.6, 6.5, 7.8, 12, and 15 nm. In the case of the thinnest QW, we observed a typical effect of screening of the built-in field manifested with a blue shift of the electroluminescence spectrum at high current densities, whereas the LEDs with 6.5 and 7.8 nm QWs exhibited extremely high blue shift at low current densities accompanied by complex spectrum with multiple optical transitions. On the other hand, LEDs with the thickest QWs showed a stable, single-peak emission throughout the whole current density range. In order to obtain insight into the physical mechanisms behind this complex behavior, we performed self-consistent Schrodinger–Poisson simulations. We show that variation in the emission spectra between the samples is related to changes in the carrier density and differences in the magnitude of screening of the built-in field inside QWs. Moreover, we show that the excited states play a major role in carrier recombination for all QWs, apart from the thinnest one.

This paper presents a comparative study of electron transport phenomena in n-type gallium nitride strongly doped, above the Mott transition, with silicon and germanium. The samples under study were grown by molecular beam epitaxy, metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy and halide vapor phase epitaxy. The temperature dependence of resistivity and Hall Effect was investigated at temperatures ranging from 10 K up to 650 K. The measurements at sub-room temperatures allow the study of scattering mechanisms related to extrinsic material properties. The observed temperature dependences of the electrical transport properties were analyzed in the frame of the model taking into account a typical scattering mechanism and degree of degeneracy of free carrier electron gas. The limitations of the applied models will be presented.