Wide-band gap ZnO semiconductors are attractive materials for the investigation of microcavity exciton polaritons due to the large exciton binding energy and oscillator strength. We report the growth and characterization of bulk ZnO-based hybrid microcavity. The phenomenon of strong exciton-photon coupling at room temperature has been observed in the ZnO-based hybrid microcavity structure, which consists of 30 pair epitaxially grown AlN/AlGaN distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) on the bottom side of the $3/2\lambda$ thick ZnO cavity and 9 pair ${\text{SiO}}_2/{\text{HfO}}_2$ DBR as the top mirror. The cavity quality factor is about 221. The experimental results show good agreement with theoretically calculated exciton-polariton dispersion curves based on transfer matrix method. From the theoretical and experimental exciton-polariton dispersion curves with two different cavity-exciton detuning values, the large vacuum Rabi splitting is estimated to be about 58 meV in the ZnO-based hybrid microcavity.

The polarization-dependent photoluminescence (PL) of the a-plane ZnO (a-ZnO) films grown on r-plane sapphire substrates shows that the crystal-field energy splitting (Δ_CF) becomes larger with increasing film thickness from 24 nm to 291 nm. In the use of the nonlinear fitting of the stress–strain tensor to the X-ray diffraction data, we found crystal symmetry breaking from wurtzite to monoclinic in these films and determined the corresponding lattice constants and the relaxed lattice constants. With the available lattice variables, we further used the tight-binding method to calculate the band energies and compared with the PL spectra. The results confirm that the crystal deformation and the non-centrosymmetric displacement had opposite effects on the Δ_CF at the Γ point and the displacement induced by the strain is the dominant effect on Δ_CF.

Coherent acoustic phonons and carrier dynamics in ZnO/Zn_0.8Mg_0.2O multiple quantum wells from the perturbation of the built-in electric field are investigated using a degenerate pump–probe measurement technique near the exciton resonance.

Unlike coherent acoustic phonons (CAPs) generated from heat induced thermal stress by the coated Au film, we demonstrated the oscillation from c-ZnO epitaxial film on oxide buffered Si through a degenerate pump–probe technique. As the excited photon energy was set below the exciton resonance, the electronic stress that resulted from defect resonance was used to induce acoustic wave. The damped oscillation revealed a superposition of a high frequency and long decay CAP signal with a backward propagating acoustic pulse which was generated by the absorption of the penetrated pump beam at the Si surface and selected by the ZnO layer as the acoustic resonator.

X-ray excited optical luminescence (XEOL) using an x-ray nanobeam operating in the hybrid bunch mode provides not only a sufficiently high peak power density but also high-quality temporal domain measurements for studying the luminescence dynamics of photonic materials and devices. We used these features to investigate the peculiar emission behavior of the as-grown and rapid thermal annealing (RTA)-treated a-plane MgZnO epi-films, from which an anomalous emission was observed at ∼325 nm, along with a rapid increase in near-band edge (NBE) emission with increasing x-ray irradiation time. This peculiar emission behavior was also observed in the cathodoluminescence spectra obtained under electron beam excitation. Increases in the NBE emission intensity of the RTA-treated a-plane MgZnO epi-film were observed in terms of both photoluminescence and small anomalous emissions of XEOL. This can be explained by the effective transfer of Mg atoms from interstitial sites to suitable sites as a result of RTA treatment. Based on comparison with an a-plane ZnO epi-film without Mg, we conclude that the anomalous emission peak is caused by Mg-related energy states created by the high-dose x-ray or electron beam irradiation. Furthermore, the rapid increase in NBE emission and the reduction in the long decay lifetime can be attributed to charge transfer from the Mg clusters, which are thus responsible for the anomalous emissions.