Impact of thermal annealing on bulk InGaAsSbN materials grown by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy

Two different thermal annealing techniques (rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and in-situ post-growth annealing in the metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) chamber) were employed to investigate their impact on the optical characteristics of double-heterostructures (DH) of InGaAsSbN/GaAs and on the performance of single-junction solar cell structures, all grown by MOVPE. We find that an optimized RTA procedure leads to a similar improvement in the photoluminescence (PL) intensity compared with material employing a multi-step optimized anneal within the MOVPE reactor. Time-resolved photoluminescence techniques at low temperature (LT) and room temperature (RT) were performed to characterize the carrier dynamics in bulk InGaAsSbN layers. Room temperature carrier lifetimes were found to be similar for both annealing methods, although the LT-PL (16K) measurements of the MOVPE-annealed sample found longer lifetimes than the RTA-annealed sample (680ps vs. 260ps) for the PL measurement energy of 1.24eV. InGaAsSbN-based single junction solar cells processed with the optimized RTA procedure exhibited an enhancement of the electrical performance, such as improvements in open circuit voltage, short circuit current, fill factor, and efficiency over solar cells subjected to the in-situ MOVPE annealing technique.