Tunable and abrupt thermal quenching of photoluminescence in high-resistivity Zn-doped GaN

Tunable and abrupt thermal quenching of photoluminescence by increasing temperature has been observed for the blue band in high-resistivity Zn-doped GaN. The photoluminescence intensity dropped by several orders of magnitude within a few Kelvins, and the temperature at which that drop occurred could be tuned by changing the incident light intensity. Modeling the system with rate equations for competing electron-hole recombination flows through three defect species, one of which is a nonradiative deep donor, gives results consistent with these observations