Temperature dependent dielectric function and the E critical points of hexagonal GaN from 30 to 690 K

The complex dielectric function ɛ and the E0 excitonic and band-edge critical-point structures of hexagonal GaN are reported for temperatures from 30 to 690 K and energies from 0.74 to 6.42 eV, obtained by rotating-compensator spectroscopic ellipsometry on a 1.9 μm thick GaN film deposited on a c-plane (0001) sapphire substrate by molecular beam epitaxy. Direct inversion and B-splines in a multilayer-structure calculation were used to extract the optical properties of the film from the measured pseudodielectric function ⟨ɛ⟩. At low temperature sharp E0 excitonic and critical-point interband transitions are separately observed. Their temperature dependences were determined by fitting the data to the empirical Varshni relation and the phenomenological expression that contains the Bose-Einstein statistical factor.