Photoluminescence intensity of GaN films with widely varying dislocation density

We investigated the impact of the presence of dislocations on room-temperature photoluminescence intensity in GaN films grown by molecular beam epitaxy. To determine both screw and edge dislocation densities, we employed x-ray diffraction in conjunction with a geometrical model, which relate the width of the respective reflections to the polar and azimuthal orientational spread. There is no direct dependence of the emission efficiency on the density of either type of dislocation in the samples under investigation. We conclude that dislocations are not the dominant nonradiative recombination centers for GaN grown by molecular beam epitaxy.