Optical Study of p-Doping in GaAs Nanowires for Low-Threshold and High-Yield Lasing

Semiconductor nanowires suffer from significant non-radiative surface recombination; however, heavy p-type doping has proven to be a viable option to increase the radiative recombination rate and, hence, quantum efficiency of emission, allowing the demonstration of room-temperature lasing. Using a large-scale optical technique, we have studied Zn-doped GaAs nanowires to understand and quantify the effect of doping on growth and lasing properties. We measure the non-radiative recombination rate ( k_nr) to be (0.14 ± 0.04) ps^-1 by modeling the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) as a function of doping level. By applying a correlative method, we identify doping and nanowire length as key controllable parameters determining lasing behavior, with reliable room-temperature lasing occurring for p ≳ 3 × 10¹⁸ cm^-3 and lengths of ≳4 μm. We report a best-in-class core-only near-infrared nanowire lasing threshold of ∼10 μJ cm^-2, and using a data-led filtering step, we present a method to simply identify subsets of nanowires with over 90% lasing yield.