Photoreflectance study at the micrometer scale

Photoreflectance (PR) spectroscopy has proven to be a very efficient non-destructive tool to get information on various semiconducting epitaxial structures as it is very sensitive to every direct optical transitions in semiconducting quantum structures and allows as well to optically measure internal electric fields in space charge layers, through Franz–Keldysh oscillation (FKO) analysis.We have developed an experimental setup to get micro-PR spectra on epitaxial structures or devices on a few micrometer size spots. Due to very low signal intensity, experimental conditions have to be very carefully controlled: the signal/noise ratio strongly depends on the pump–probe power ratio. We give experimental micro-PR results recorded on antimonide-based heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), which give the local electric field at the emitter–base junction under different biasing conditions. A second part of the paper is devoted to micro-PR analysis performed on tuneable vertical cavity surface emitting layers (VCSELs) with InP/air Bragg mirrors. In such VCSELs, both the cavity Fabry–Perot peak and the active region quantum well ground state are giving transitions in the micro-PR spectrum. This is very useful in the case of a tuneable structure. Feasibility of micro-PR analysis at the device scale is demonstrated