Low Surface Recombination in Hexagonal SiGe Alloy Nanowires: Implications for SiGe-Based Nanolasers

Monolithic integration of silicon-based electronics and photonics could open the door toward many opportunities including on-chip optical data communication and large-scale application of light-based sensing devices in healthcare and automotive; by some, it is considered the Holy Grail of silicon photonics. The monolithic integration is, however, severely hampered by the inability of Si to efficiently emit light. Recently, important progress has been made by the demonstration of efficient light emission from direct-bandgap hexagonal SiGe (hex-SiGe) alloy nanowires. For this promising material, realized by employing a nanowire structure, many challenges and open questions remain before a large-scale application can be realized. Considering that for other direct-bandgap materials like GaAs, surface recombination can be a true bottleneck, one of the open questions is the importance of surface recombination for the photoluminescence efficiency of this new material. In this work, temperature-dependent photoluminescence measurements were performed on both hex-Ge and hex-SiGe nanowires with and without surface passivation schemes that have been well documented and proven effective on cubic silicon and germanium to elucidate whether and to what extent the internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of the wires can be improved. Additionally, time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) measurements were performed on unpassivated hex-SiGe nanowires as a function of their diameter. The dependence of the surface recombination on the SiGe composition could, however, not be yet addressed given the sample-to-sample variations of the state-of-the-art hex-SiGe nanowires. With the aforementioned experiments, we demonstrate that at room temperature, under high excitation conditions (a few kW cm^-2), the hex-(Si)Ge surface is most likely not a bottleneck for efficient radiative emission under relatively high excitation conditions. This is an important asset for future hex(Si)Ge optoelectronic devices, specifically for nanolasers.