Role of defects in the thermal droop of InGaN-based light emitting diodes

This paper reports an investigation of the physical origin of the thermal droop (the drop of the optical power at high temperatures) in InGaN-based light-emitting diodes. We critically investigate the role of various mechanisms including Shockley-Read-Hall recombination, thermionic escape from the quantum well, phonon-assisted tunneling, and thermionic trap-assisted tunneling; in addition, to explain the thermal droop, we propose a closed-form model which is able to accurately fit the experimental data by using values extracted from measurements and simulations and a limited set of fitting parameters. The model is based on a two-step phonon-assisted tunneling over an intermediate defective state, corrected in order to take into account the pure thermionic component at zero bias and the field-assisted term.