Capacitance spectroscopy of degraded GaAsP light-emitting diodes

We employ the technique of deep-level transient spectroscopy to study a series of rapidly degraded GaAs0.6P0.4 LED’s. We observe a dramatic increase in the density of defects, two of which appear to be effective recombination centers. The cross-section measurements for these centers are equipment limited, but even these values limit the nonradiative minority-carrier lifetime to less than 20 ns.