Effect of isotopic mass on the photoluminescence spectra of β zinc sulfide

Zinc sulfide is a wide bandgap semiconductor which crystallizes in either the wurtzite modification (α-ZnS), the zincblende modification (β-ZnS) or as one of several similar tetrahedrally coordinated polytypes. In this work, we report a photoluminescence study of different samples of isotopically pure β-ZnS crystals, and crystals with the natural isotopic abundances, at 15 and 77 K. The derivatives of the free and bound exciton energies on isotopic mass have been obtained. They allow us to estimate the contribution of the zinc and sulfur vibrations to the bandgap renormalization energy by electron–phonon interaction. A two-oscillator model based on the zinc and sulfur renormalization energies has been used to account for the temperature dependence of the bandgap energy in ZnS. The results are compared with those found for other tetrahedrally coordinated semiconductors.