Electric field distribution and exciton recombination line shape in GaAs

We studied the photoluminescence line shapes of free and bound excitons in a n-modulation doped Al 1 − x Ga x As –GaAs heterostructure with linearly increasing electric field in the p-doped buffer. At small laser excitation power the line shapes of the neutral donor bound and free excitons deviate strongly from a simple Lorentzian, whereas the neutral acceptor bound exciton is not obviously affected. Asymmetric lines of sawtooth-type form are observed for the donor bound and the free exciton. The line asymmetry could be traced back to the field dependent exciton binding energy and the field distribution in our heterostructure. A simple analytical model can account for the field dependent line shapes and a fit to the experimental lines gives a satisfactory agreement.