Inside Back Cover: First‐principles investigation of the electronic structures of edge dislocations in GaN (Phys. Status Solidi A 7/2011)

Considerable experimental evidence suggests that threading dislocations act as nonradiative centers in GaN devices. Although their role in InGaN based devices is less important due to spinodal decomposition, there is no doubt about their contributions to lower external quantum efficiency in AlGaN. In order to understand the underlying mechanism of nonradiative recombinations attributed to these centers, a thorough understanding of their electronic structures is necessary. Mishra et al. (pp. 1555–1557) have made an attempt to investigate in detail the electronic structure of an edge dislocation using first principles density functional band structure methods. The cover image shows the quantum-mechanical band structure simulation of lattice relaxation surrounding edge dislocations in GaN. Displayed are the Ga (yellow) and N (blue) atoms in a 4 × 4 × 3 supercell. The contour lines of the valence charge density are also shown for two planes perpendicular to the missing (1120) plane on a color continuum of blue to red with increasing charge density