Band-edge optical transitions in a nonpolar-plane GaN substrate: exciton–phonon coupling and temperature effects

We present a detailed investigation of the band-edge optical transitions involving the interacting exciton–phonon system, especially first-order longitudinal optical (LO) phonon-assisted luminescence of bound and free excitons in m - and c -plane GaN substrates in a low temperature range from 4 K to 40 K. The main luminescence features of all of the three kinds of excitons can be well described by the theoretical models that take exciton-LO-phonon coupling into account. The effective Bohr radii of the excitons play a key role in determining the Huang–Rhys factor characterizing the exciton-LO-phonon coupling strength in GaN. An interesting oscillatory structure is found to appear in the low-temperature luminescence spectra of the nonpolar-plane GaN substrate, which needs to be clarified by further investigations. (paper)