Infrared studies of hole-plasmon excitations in heavily-doped p-type MBE-grown GaAs:C

Infrared reflectivity measurements (200--5000 cm^-1) and transmittance measurements (500--5000 cm^-1) have been carried out on heavily-doped GaAs:C films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. With increasing carbon concentration, a broad reflectivity minimum develops in the 1000--3000 cm^-1 region and the one-phonon band near 270 cm^-1 rides on a progressively increasing high-reflectivity background. An effective-plasmon/one-phonon dielectric function with only two free parameters (plasma frequency ωₚ and damping constant γ) gives a good description of the main features of both the reflectivity and transmittance spectra. The dependence of ωₚ² on hole concentration p is linear; at p=1.4×10²⁰ cm^-3, ωₚ is 2150 cm^-1. At each doping, the damping constant γ is large and corresponds to an infrared hole mobility that is about half the Hall mobility. Secondary-ion mass spectroscopy and localized-vibrational-mode measurements indicate that the Hall-derived p is close to the carbon concentration and that the Hall factor is close to unity, so that the Hall mobility provides a good estimate of actual dc mobility. The observed dichotomy between the dc and infrared mobilities is real, not a statistical-averaging artifact. The explanation of the small infrared mobility resides in the influence of intervalence-band absorption on the effective-plasmon damping, which operationally determines that mobility. This is revealed by a comparison of the infrared absorption results to Braunstein's low-p p-GaAs spectra and to a k·p calculation extending Kane's theory to our high dopings. For n-GaAs, which lacks infrared interband absorption, the dc and infrared mobilities do not differ.