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We report the first observation of infrared photoluminescence from HgTe-CdTe superlattices. A superlattice grown to have layers of HgTe 38–40 Å thick and layers of CdTe 18–20 Å thick is found to show a peak in the 140-K spectra at 105 meV (11.8 μm). A second superlattice grown to have HgTe layers 50 Å thick and CdTe layers 50 Å thick is found to show a peak at 205 meV (6.0 μm) at 170 K. In both cases, the energy of the luminescence is significantly lower than that for HgCdTe alloys with the same average composition as each sample.
Hetzler et al. (1985) studied this question.