Temperature Dependence of Electronic Bands in Al/GaN by Utilization of Invariant Deep Defect Transition Energies

We show experimentally that deep point defect levels in GaN, AlN, and AlGaN are constant with respect to the vacuum level and can be used as invariant internal energy references. This offered a convenient and quick way to assess band shifts and impurity levels as a function of temperature via photoluminescence. For AlGaN, we determined that the band shift in the temperature range of 3–600 K occurred primarily in the valence band and that the lowering of the conduction band edge was comparatively small. The valence band shift (as a fraction of the Varshni bandgap shift) in AlGaN varies from ∼70% in AlN to ∼90% in GaN.