High resolution resonant Raman scattering in InP and GaAs

Previous studies of III-V semiconductors using resonant Raman scattering have concentrated on measuring the variations in scattering intensity under different excitation conditions. The shape of the Raman line also contains important information, but this has usually been lost because the low signal strengths mean that resolution has been sacrificed for sensitivity. It might therefore be expected that further insights into the processes involved in Raman scattering could be obtained by using high resolution methods. In this thesis I have measured single- and multiple- phonon scattering from bulk GaAs and InP with a spectral resolution better than the intrinsic widths of the Raman lines. For scattering in the region of one longitudinal optic (LO) phonon energy, it is found that in InP the scattering in the allowed and forbidden configurations occur at different Raman shifts, above and below the zone-centre phonon energy respectively. These shifts are used to determine the scattering processes involved, and how they differ between InP and GaAs. The lineshapes obtained in multiple-phonon scattering are found to depend strongly on the excitation energy used, providing evidence for the presence of intermediate resonances. The measured spectra are used to provide information about the phonon dispersion of InP, whose dispersion it is difficult to measure in any other way, and the first evidence is found for an upward dispersion of the LO mode. Raman lineshapes are measured for InP in a magnetic field. The field alters the electronic bandstructure, leading to a series of strong resonances in the Raman efficiency due to interband magneto-optical transitions between Landau levels. This allows multiphonon processes up to sixth-order to be investigated. (author)